UNIVERSITY EXTENSION ADDRESSES 

LORD PLAYFAIR 
CANON BROWNE 
MR. GOSCHEN 
MR. JOHN M.O'RLEY 
SIR JAMES PAGET 
PROF. MAX MULLER 
DUKE OF ARGYLL 
BISHOP WESTCOTT 
PROFESSOR J EBB 



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ASPECTS OF MODEEN STUDY 

UNIVERSITY EXTENSION ADDRESSES 



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ASPECTS 



OF 



MODERN STUDY 



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UNIVEBSITY EXTENSION ADDKESSES 



BY LORD PLAYFAIE, CANON BROWNE, MR. GOSCHEN, 

MR. JOHN MORLEY, SIR JAMES PAGET, 

PROFESSOR MAX MULLER, THE DUKE OF ARGYLL, 

THE BISHOP OF DURHAM, AND 

PROFESSOR JEBB 



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MACMILLAN AND CO. 

AND NEW YORK 
1894 



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PREFACE 

The Addresses included in this volume were delivered 
to the students of the London Society for the Exten- 
sion of University Teaching at the Annual Meetings 
held in the Mansion House from year to year by the 
courtesy of the Lord Mayor. These gatherings were 
first instituted in 1886, the tenth year of the Society's 
existence. By means of them the Council of the 
London Society sought to attain two chief ends. On 
the one hand they hoped through the medium of 
Addresses by men of distinction to hold before the 
students a high ideal of educational purpose, and on 
the other to promote and foster a sense of corporate 
educational life among the workers from the various 
Extension Centres in different parts of London. The 
importance of these objects will be readily acknow- 
ledged. Men and women desirous of carrying on 
studies in which they are interested, but unable to 
give their whole time to education, find at the Univer- 
sity Extension Lectures stimulus, guidance, and oppor^ 



vi UNIVERSITY EXTENSION ADDRESSES 

trinities for intellectual training which the conditions 
of adult life render it impossible for them to seek at 
a College. The Annual Meetings have brought these 
scattered workers together, and have helped them to 
realise that they are taking part in a great movement. 
That the opportunity of hearing the Addresses was 
highly valued could not be doubted by any one who 
witnessed the crowded state of the hall on each occa- 
sion, and the Council hope by the publication of this 
volume to extend the inspiring and helpful influence 
of the Addresses to a larger audience and over a 
wider area. 

The growth and development of the University 
Extension movement, since it was inaugurated by the 
University of Cambridge twenty-one years ago, has 
been remarkable, and its history is peculiarly interest- 
ing and instructive. The purpose of the originators 
was to promote the development of student life side 
by side with business life — to create a new type of 
students, carrying on into mature years their higher 
education concurrently with the occupations of every- 
day life. The members of the London Society are 
able to recall with satisfaction that the foundation of 
that Society in 1876 was the first step taken outside 
Cambridge to follow the lead of that University in 
this new sphere of educational activity. Two years 



PREFACE vil 

later similar work was undertaken by the University 
of Oxford, and since then other Universities in the 
United Kingdom, notably Yictoria, have followed in 
the same path. England is now covered with a net- 
work of Centres, and something has been done in the 
same direction in other parts of the kingdom. The 
movement has been introduced into English-speaking 
countries all over the world, and has aroused great 
interest on the Continent of Europe, where schemes 
are being started on similar lines. This rapid pro- 
gress proves that the system is well adapted to meet 
certain pressing educational needs of the time. At 
the present moment educational interest in London 
gathers largely around the proposed Teaching Univer- 
sity. Had London possessed a Teaching University 
in 1876 the formation of the London Society would, 
in all probability, have been unnecessary, as the work 
would doubtless have been undertaken by the Univer- 
sity itself. As it was the University of London did 
all that was possible under its constitution by consent- 
ing, in conjunction with the Universities of Oxford 
and Cambridge, to appoint a Universities' Joint Board 
to co-operate with the Council of the Society in carry- 
ing on the work. The Council look to the eventual 
establishment of a University which will have power 
to take up and carry on into higher stages of efficiency 



vm UNIVERSITY EXTENSION ADDRESSES 

and perfection this work, the necessity for which 
their operations during eighteen years have abundantly 
proved. They feel that the results of the educational 
experiments of the last two decades in the extension 
of University Teaching amply justify a belief in the 
possibility of an active trained intellectual life for all 
who are willing to pursue it, without question of age, 
social position, or condition of life, and they regard 
the development of adequate educational opportunities 
for evening students as a matter of prime national 
importance. 

The Addresses, with the exception of those by Lord 
Playfair and Canon Browne, are arranged in chrono- 
logical order. These two, unlike the others, deal with 
the University Extension movement itself rather than 
with special aspects of study, and it has, therefore, 
seemed natural to place them together at the beginning 
of the volume. 

ElTD! " EOBEETS, 

Secretary of the London Society for the 
Extension of University Teaching. 

Charterhouse. London, E.C. 
tth June 1894. 



lY 



CONTENTS 



The Evolution of University Extension as a part of 
Popular Education. By the Right Hon. Lord Play- 
fair, K.C.B., LL.D., F.R.S. 1894 . 1 

The Future of University Extension in London. By 

the Rev. Canon Browne. 1892 . . .' .17 

Hearing, Reading, and Thinking. By the Right Hon. 

G. J. Goschen, D.C.L., M.P. 1886 . . .39 

The Study of Literature. By the Right Hon. John 

Morley, M.P. 1887 . . . . .57 

Scientific Study. By Sir James Paget, Bart., F.R.S. 

1888 84 

Some Lessons of Antiquity. By Professor F. Max 

Muller, LL.D. 1889 . ' . . . .102 

The Application of the Historical Method to Economic 
Science. By His Grace the Duke of Argyll, K.G. 
1890 . . . . . • • 123 

Ideals. By the Bishop of Durham (Dr. Westcott). 1891 154 

The Influence of the Greek Mind on Modern Life. 

By Professor Jebb, Litt.D., M.P. 1893 . . 168 



THE EVOLUTION OF UNIVERSITY EXTEN- 
SION AS A PAET OF POPULAR EDUCA- 
TION 

/ 
By the Right Hon. Lord Playfair, K.C.B., LL.D., F.R.S. 

1894 

Recently the London University Commission, of 
which I was a member, has made its report, and 
during its sitting we received much evidence in favour 
of the University Extension Scheme, as well as some 
evidence hostile to it. I think the opposition arose 
from a misunderstanding of its origin and purposes, 
and upon these I should like to address you. The 
extension of University knowledge and educational 
methods to the people who are unable to attend 
University courses during the day, is one of the pro- 
cesses of evolution of popular education which has 
been trying to organise itself for about a century. 

Universities in former times used to be more 
largely attended than now. Bologna University was 
said to be attended by 20,000 students, and Paris 
and Oxford by 30,000. These numbers are open to 
doubt, though, as there were few grammar schools, and 

B 



2 UNIVERSITY EXTENSION ADDRESSES 

as students entered at ten and eleven years of age, 
the Universities were no doubt more frequented than 
they are now, and by a poorer class of students, who 
often begged their way to the University from mon- 
astery to monastery. Chaucer alludes to this when he 
says : — 

Busily gan for the souls to pray 

Of them that gave him wherewith to scolay. 

Education, in the sense we are now considering it, 
as attainable by the people at large in their hours of 
leisure after their day's work, is the product of the 
present century. Let us consider the conditions under 
which the demands for it arose. 

Up to the last quarter of the eighteenth century 
the learned class and the working class were separated 
by a high impassable wall, because each spoke in a 
language that the other could not understand. For 
about two thousand years the learned class spoke, 
thought, and talked in Latin, and for about two 
centuries Greek had been raised as a second wall of 
separation between the learned and the people. No 
doubt the people were creating knowledge of another 
kind by enlarging their conception of things, while the 
learned were dealing with literature and philosophy 
through words. I do not allude to the early days 
when Borne and Greece spoke their own vernacular, and 
when their writers and philosophers largely recruited 
themselves from the people. The learned class were 
then the sons of citizens, and were in possession of 
the accumulated experiences of the people. I refer 
to a much later period, after the dark ages, when the 
light gradually illuminating the darkness was the 



LORD PLAYFAIR 3 

borrowed light of Borne and Greece. It was then 
that the learned linked themselves to the past, and 
separated themselves from the present. Then it was 
that they adopted the ancient languages as the expres- 
sion of their thoughts and teaching, while the people 
went on their way without caring for the pedants 
whose very language was incomprehensible to them. 

Among the people the industries were growing by 
experience, and modern science was being evolved as 
an outcome of their enlarged conceptions. Working 
men then made journeys to enlarge these experiences, 
and the memory of the old habit still survives in the 
industries under such familiar names as "journeyman 
carpenter," "journeyman blacksmith," and so on; for 
the tyro was a mere apprentice until he graduated to 
his full position as a working man by an education 
not got at school but obtained in journeys, which en- 
larged his experiences and knowledge. When I was 
a student in Germany in 1838, I recollect constantly 
meeting parties of these journeymen on the way from 
one town to another. An old German saying, freely 
translated, explains how technical education was 
attained in this way : — 

Who shall pupil be ? Every one. 

Who shall craftsman be ? Who good work has done. 

Who shall master be 1 He whose thought has won. 

By the end of the fifteenth century most of our 
present industries were fairly established in this way. 
During that century the printing press was introduced, 
and knowledge was ultimately widely spread as well 
as conserved. In the sixteenth century newspapers 
were published in the vernacular, and the people got a 



4 UNIVERSITY EXTENSION ADDRESSES 

powerful means of recording their mental conceptions, 
which were chiefly those of developing science. - In 
England, however, newspapers did not fully establish 
themselves till the period of the Civil war, and then 
they were poor in quality. They scarcely came into 
the life of the nation till the reign of Queen Anne, 
during Marlborough's victories. The learned class 
still adhered to their Latin and Greek, and kept them- 
selves outside these great movements. Latin was, in 
fact, the universal language for learning, being a sort 
of glorified volapuk. Sometimes a treatise was written 
in the vernacular, as when Bacon wrote in English 
The Advancement of Learning, though he asked his 
friend Dr. Playfair to translate it into Latin, because, he 
says, " The privateness of the language, wherein it is 
written, limits my readers," and its translation into 
Latin " would give a second birth of that work." So 
also when Bacon sends his Be Augmentis Scientiarum 
to the Prince of Wales, he says it is in Latin, " as a 
book which will live and be a citizen of the world, as 
English books are not." The vernacular was, however, 
being introduced into our schools, though it was not 
generally used till the close of the eighteenth centur}^. 
Learned papers and discourses were now published in 
English, although at first they were duplicated into 
Latin. A general use of the vernacular made a 
common road on which both the learned classes and the 
working classes could again travel, as they had done in 
the grand old days of Greece and Eome, when Plato 
and Aristotle and Cicero and Horace spoke and wrote 
and thought in the common languages of the people. 

Now began the desire for popular education, of 
which University Extension is one of the signs. Let 



LORD PLAYFAIR 5 

us see how that form of popular education became 
evolved in this movement among the people, who 
were shut out from the possibility of attending colleges 
of learning. "Working men know that one of their 
two hands must always be employed in earning their 
daily bread, but they have another hand with which 
they could work for their own improvement, and for 
that of the community, if they only had the opportunity 
and knew how to employ it. Before the age of printing- 
books were necessarily costly, so the ancient method of 
obtaining knowledge was to attend public lectures or 
discourses, and they became the chief mode of higher 
education. It was so in classical times, when people 
flocked to the market-place in Athens to hear Socrates, 
and to the groves of Academus to hear Plato, or 
joined the Peripatetics in the walks of the Lyceum to 
listen to the scientific teaching of Aristotle. So it con- 
tinued in every country where learning was cared for 
at all, and poor students went, begging on the way, to 
listen to lectures by Abelard in France, Chrysoloras in 
Italy, or Erasmus in Oxford and then at Cambridge. 
When printing presses multiplied books, knowledge 
could be acquired by those who could read, and was 
no longer confined to the few who could discourse. 
Public libraries for the people are, however, only 
inventions of our own day, and at the beginning of 
this century did not exist. 

The people readily co-operated with Birkbeck and 
others in founding institutes of their own where they 
could read and hear lectures. One of the earliest of 
these exists in the City under the well known name of 
the "Birkbeck Institute," which has now a new lease 
of active life as a systematic school of science and 



6 UNIVERSITY EXTENSION ADDRESSES 

commerce. The people in the early part of the century 
were only groping in the dark for the kind of higher 
education which they desired. The Mechanics' Insti- 
tutes supplemented small and defective libraries by 
single and unconnected lectures. In fact, the associ- 
ated members of these institutes scarcely knew what 
they wanted. Some joined the institutes for amuse- 
ment, some for instruction. Both were proper objects 
of desire, but were difficult to amalgamate, so a 
strange mixture was made, often not very wisely, by 
the inexperienced managers of the New Mechanics' 
Institutes. One of the most prosperous of them asked 
me to give a single lecture on Chemistry, in the year 
1846, and sent me its programme for the preceding 
year. It was as follows : " Wit and Humour, with 
Comic Songs — Women Treated in a Novel Manner — 
Legerdemain and Spirit-rapping — The Devil (with 
illustrations) — The Heavenly Bodies and the Stellar 
System — Palestine and the Holy Land — Speeches by 
Eminent Friends of Education, interspersed with 
Music, to be followed by a Ball. Price to the whole, 
2 s. 6d. Eefreshments in an Anteroom." Compare 
your programme of sound work with this motley 
assemblage of Professors, Ventriloquists, Conjurors, and 
Musicians, and you will see how much the scheme of 
University Extension has moulded the demand for 
knowledge among the people, and turned it into 
channels which will refresh and irrigate the various 
districts through which it passes. The Mechanics' 
Institutions where they still exist have altered them- 
selves into systematic schools, either scientific, technical, 
or artistic, but they have still left outside the people 
who have not been trained to use schools. 



LORD PLAYFAIR 7 

The "universities associated to supply this want. 
In the universities there are always a number of 
zealous graduates who desire to extend to others the 
knowledge possessed by themselves. They are ani- 
mated by the spirit of the famous Loup de Ferrie-res, 
who, a thousand years ago, wrote to Charles the Bold : 
" I desire to teach what I have learned and am daily 
learning." This spirit led to the scheme of University 
Extension. Gradually, not yet completely, but surely, 
the people who demand your courses of lectures appre- 
ciate and follow them because they are systematic and 
in proper sequence ; and because the lecturer also 
becomes the tutor to each student who really desires 
to understand and profit by the subject taught. In 
ordinary popular lectures the lecturer treats his 
audience as a mass, throwing his information broadcast 
over it, ignorant as to where it may fall, and careless 
as to whether the seed falls on fertile soil or on stony 
places, where it can take no root. When the lecturer 
acts also as a tutor he looks upon his audience as indi- 
viduals, he drills his seed into productive soil, taking care 
that the ground is prepared to receive it, and that each 
seed gets its proper proportion of food-giving manure. 
The minds of the teacher and the taught get into an 
intellectual grapple, and as the former should be the 
stronger man, he is enabled to drag the mind of the 
student from the dark holes in which it may lurk into 
the broad light of day. In a college or technical 
school a tutorial system ought always to be combined 
with the lectures. Under your system of peripatetic 
lectures it is more difficult of application, but you do 
much by the weekly exercises and final examination as 
well as by making the courses consequential in series. 



8 UNIVERSITY EXTENSION ADDRESSES 

The examiners for the certificates, who are not the 
lecturers, testify by their University experience to the 
good results which are attained. 

To understand the object of the promoters of 
University Extension it is important neither to exag- 
gerate these results nor to depreciate the value of the 
system. The main purpose is not to educate the 
masses, but to permeate them with the desire for 
intellectual improvement, and to show them methods 
by which they can attain this desire. Every man, 
who acquires a taste for learning and is imbued 
with the desire to acquire more of it, becomes more 
valuable as a citizen, because he is more intelligent and 
perceptive. As Shakespeare says : — 

Learning is but an adjunct to ourself . . . 
It adds a precious seeing to the eye. 

It is this addition of " a precious seeing to the eye " 
which produces progress in science. Of the five gate- 
ways of knowledge, the " eye gate " is not opened in- 
differently to all. The range of vision of the bat and 
of the eagle is very different. The most familiar 
objects to man, like air and water, are nothing more 
to the untutored intellect of man than the primrose 
was to Peter Bell : — 

A primrose by a river's brim 
A yellow primrose was to him, 
And it was nothing more. 

Before the mind of man learns to question Nature, 
he is apt to look for the explanations of phenomena to 
the intellectual conceptions of his own untutored mind. 
When he knows how to put an experimental question 



LORD PLAYFAIR 9 

to Nature lie is on the high road to knowledge — 
prudens quaestio dimidium scientiae est. 

Thales, who flourished in the seventh century before 
Christ, was among the first philosophers to speculate 
upon the constitution of the universe. He thought 
everything was made out of water. The sun dipped in 
the evening below the western wave, and rose out of 
the ocean in the east mightily refreshed by its huge 
drink — so the sun was made out of water. Water, as 
the river Nile, overflowed the land of Egypt and crops 
grew in luxuriance — so plants were made out of water. 
The ocean, when it was stormy, was engaged in the 
manufacture of earth, and the proof is that after a 
storm new sand and pebbles are heaped on the shore. 
The real nature of water was only discovered at the 
end of last century. 

How little our ancestors knew about air, and how 
little we yet know about it in the nineteenth century ! 
Yet, if mere observation could suffice to know a thing, 
air should be better understood than anything in the 
world. When the first man drew his first breath, he 
began his familiarity with air. In each phase of his 
life man meets it at every turn. It fans him with gentle 
breezes, and it buffets him with storms. It is never 
absent from every act of his existence, and the last act 
of his life is his inability to respire it. The first philoso- 
pher who studied air in a scientific way w T as Anaximenes. 
He lived 548 years before Christ, and men have been 
studying air ever since, and have laboriously brought 
up our knowledge to our present position. Aristotle 
brought his shrewd powers of observation upon air, 
and established that it was a material and not a spirit. 
A wonderful Saracen, called Alhazen, found that it had 



10 UNIVERSITY EXTENSION ADDRESSES 

weight, and showed that it was heavier at the bottom 
of a mountain than at its top. Galileo again took up 
the study of air in 1630, and made important dis- 
coveries which led Torricelli and others to the dis- 
covery of the barometer. It is scarcely more than a 
century since mankind gave up air as an element, and it 
is only during my lifetime that we have been taught the 
true chemical nature of air, and that its relations to the 
great phenomena of vegetable and animal life have been 
explained. When I was first a student of chemistry, 
air consisted of nitrogen and oxygen with watery 
vapour. During my life carbonic acid, ammonia, 
nitric acid, ozone, and the wide range of bacteria and 
like organisms have been discovered. We now know 
that all the foulness of the living and the products 
of the dead pass into air, and are changed into the 
food of plants, so that the great abounding atmosphere 
becomes the grave of organic death and the cradle of 
organic life. Plants and animals mutually feed on 
each other, and the death and dissolution of one 
generation is needful for the growth of a succeeding 
one. 

You see how slowly intellectual conceptions of the 
most common object gather round it. When we give 
a lecture to an ignorant audience on such subjects as 
air and water, we treat them from the platform of our 
own times — the nineteenth century. But our audience 
is not yet on that plane. In my old professorial days, 
in lecturing to classes of working men, I sometimes 
put myself on the platform on which Anaximenes 
stood 548 years before Christ, and argued as he did 
for the theory of the nature of air, and then mounted 
the ladders, taking my hearers with me, from platform 



LORD PLAYFAIR 11 

to platform of discovery, till I reached that of the 
present day. This historical mode of illustration gave 
the working men a better notion of the methods of 
scientific discovery, and taught them more completely 
that science consists of conceptions obtained by a slow 
but steady questioning of Nature. In ancient times 
there was little science, because philosophers put the 
questions to their own minds and not to Nature. The 
rapid progress of science in recent times is due to our 
questioning Nature by means of experiment. This is 
the true foundation of science, as well expressed by 
Wordsworth : — 

... To the solid ground 
Of Nature trusts the mind which builds for aye. 

This need of experimental inquiry does not apply to 
mathematics, which was a product of the opening of 
Greek civilisation, and the achievements of the Greek 
geometers, Euclid, Archimedes, and Apollonius are still 
admirable at the present day. 

If the untutored senses be sufficient to appreciate 
and understand what you see with your own eyes, and 
hear with your own ears, it would not have required 
many thousand years for mankind to acquire our 
present imperfect knowledge about air or water. In 
explaining to our students the knowledge of to-day, 
I think it would often be useful to show how it has 
been attained, and how our crude faculties have 
become tutored faculties by close thinking, observation, 
and experiment upon the most familiar objects about 
us. Theories of the past have fallen as the leaves of 
trees fall, but while they existed they drew nutriment 
to the parent stem of knowledge. The theory of 



12 UNIVERSITY EXTENSION ADDRESSES 

to-day is the error of to-morrow. Error in science is 
nothing but a shadow cast by the strong light of truth. 
Theories, as they arise, are an absolute necessity for 
the progress of science, because they collect in a com- 
mon focus all the light which is shed upon a subject at 
a particular period. The descriptions of and arguments 
for the old theories I found very useful as ladders let 
down from the nineteenth century platform, which 
enabled my uneducated audience to mount to it by 
graduated steps, until they came to the same level of 
the science which I was trying to expound to them. 

The world is still young, and science is never 
old. It is sheer vanity for any generation to suppose 
that their state of knowledge represents the final 
triumph of truth. I think it is always useful in 
educating in modern science to show how much we 
owe to our ancestors by their laborious efforts to build 
it up. We have inherited so much from the past. 
Eoger Bacon, writing so long ago as 1267, said : " The 
ancients have committed all the more errors just be- 
cause they are the ancients, for in matters of learning 
the youngest are in reality the oldest ; modern genera- 
tions ought to surpass their predecessors because they 
inherit their labours." This thought, three centuries 
later, Francis Bacon put into his famous apothegm — 
Antiquitas Seculi, Juveniles Mundi. 

It is no small object in view that your purpose is 
to permeate the mass of people with the desire for 
knowledge. It is chiefly among them that great dis- 
coverers in science and great inventors in industry 
arise. I would refer you, as an illustration, to the 
past discoverers who have adorned the lecture table of 
the Eoyal Institution in Albemarle Street. With 



LORD PLAYFAIR 13 

scarcely an exception they have sprung directly from 
the people. The original founder was Benjamin 
Thompson, afterwards Count Eumford, a provincial 
schoolmaster from New England ; and the Institution 
has had as successive professors Sir Humphry Davy, 
the son of a wood-carver; Young, illustrious in 
optics, the son, I think, of a yeoman ; Faraday, a news- 
boy ; and Tyndall, who was of humble origin. All of 
these men sprang from the people. Among inventors 
this origin from the people is still more marked. 
Watt was an instrument maker ; Wheatstone, who in- 
vented our telegraphs, was a maker of musical instru- 
ments ; and Bell, who added the telephone, was a 
teacher of deaf mutes ; Stephenson, the inventor of 
locomotives, an engine-tender at a colliery ; Arkwright, 
who revolutionised the cotton industry, was a barber. 
These instances might be multiplied indefinitely both 
from modern and ancient history. 

The great humanising movements of the world have 
sprung from the people. The Founder of our religion 
did not disdain to be called the son of Joseph the 
carpenter, and He took His disciples from among the 
working men around Him. Paul the tentmaker and 
Peter the fisherman found time to earn their daily 
bread and to diffuse the religion of Christ. The 
growth of philosophy in Greece depended upon men 
who were using one hand to win their daily bread, 
and the other to mould humanity. Socrates was a 
sculptor; Plato and Zeno were actively engaged in 
commerce ; Aristotle was the son of a physician. 
They founded schools of thought, but they themselves 
were the products of Athens and Corinth when they 
were active seats of industrial activity. 



14 UNIVERSITY EXTENSION ADDRESSES 

I hope I have made myself intelligible when I 
argue that the University Extension Movement is 
doing work of its own kind most valuable, not as an 
education of the people but as a means of permeating 
the people with a desire to be educated, and by giving 
them methods and subjects which they can use in. 
continuing their education. Your opponents still 
object to the need of doing this, because they quote 
cases, such as I have mentioned, like Faraday, Watt, 
and Stephenson, where men of the people, even in the 
absence of schools, educated themselves without aid 
from others and became great discoverers ; so they 
say it is much more easy now to do likewise when 
technical schools are covering the country, I have 
spent a large portion of my life in helping to found 
these technical schools, and, therefore, I fully ap- 
preciate their importance, but they do not even touch 
the ground covered by your movement. Such schools 
look to the education of the man for his daily work, 
and only give what the Germans call b7vdtstuclien, 
while the University Extension Movement professes to 
give mental culture, or what the Germans might call 
verstandniss-stuclien. No doubt one of your triumphs 
will be that the University Extension Scheme will 
tend largely to feed schools of science and technical 
schools with students incited to learn through your 
permeating influence in creating a taste for knowledge. 
This is as it should be. 

During my life I have enjoyed the friendship of 
many men who have risen by their own. great talents, 
such as Dalton, Faraday, Stephenson, Wheatstone, and 
Livingstone. I knew the great African discoverer, 
when he rested his book on a spinning-jenny, snatch- 



LORD PLAYFAIR 15 

ing sentence after sentence as he passed it at work ; 
and I attended the evening classes with him in 
Glasgow, and saw him pay the pennies he had saved 
during the day as a cotton-spinner. As I am recall- 
ing old memories, I may say that three companions 
studied together in those days. One was James 
Young, a carpenter ; Livingstone, a cotton-spinner ; and 
myself, the son of a physician. Young the carpenter 
established a new industry, and became very rich. 
His purse was always open to Livingstone for his 
African explorations; and, although he would never 
acknowledge it, my election committees never lacked 
funds from some mysterious donor, who I always 
believed was my old friend, for the contributions 
ceased at his death. Were my old friends now alive, 
I would call them all as witnesses as to how much 
trouble and suffering would have been saved to them, 
had they been able when young to enjoy the advan- 
tages which you now offer to the youth of this 
country by giving them the materials and methods of 
education. It is quite true that men of genius will 
cut out steps for themselves in the toilsome ascent of 
knowledge. The mistake of the argument is obvious. 
All the dwellers in a plain do not surmount the moun- 
tain which frowns upon them at the end of the valley. 
A few daring spirits may reach the summit unaided 
and pass into the world beyond, but the great mass of 
men remain in the lowlands where they were born. 
We can induce many of these to make excursions 
which will brighten their existence, by making roads 
and showing them how to use the roads. Perchance 
in doing so we may come upon a genius and put him 
on his way, and wish him God-speed ! The case 



16 UNIVERSITY EXTENSION ADDRESSES 

should not be argued by contrasting a heaven-born 
talent with ordinary ability. All systems of education 
try to draw out the mental abilities of the scholar, but 
they do not profess to give the gifts of God, or to 
create special abilities in man. Such great men as 
I have mentioned are discoverers of new truths in 
science, and the bulk of mankind must be content to 
live on a lower plane, but their life is made the 
happier, more graceful and dignified, by helping them 
to acquire some of that knowledge which shows them 
how the world has advanced and how society has 
been improved by the advances made in science, litera- 
ture, and philosophy. 

In our own time science has been the great civilis- 
ing agency. Within my own memory, I have seen 
the origin of five inventions, which have had more 
profound effect than revolutions in altering the con- 
dition of kingdoms and nations throughout the world. 
I allude to steam locomotion, telegraphy, telephony, 
photography, electric lighting, and electric locomotion. 
The discoverers in science are the artisans of civilisa- 
tion, their laboratories are the workshops, and their 
instruments of precision and experiment are the tools 
with which they perform their world labour. By the 
system which you pursue the people are made to take 
an intelligent interest in these modes of civilisation. 
The most intelligent nation will in future be the greatest 
nation, and your work is do your part in permeating 
the people with this general intelligence, which is so 
necessary for their prosperity in the competition of 
the world. 



THE FUTURE OF UNIVERSITY EXTENSION 
IN LONDON 

' By the Rev. Canon Browne 

1892 

My subject is, " The Future of University Extension in 
London." Before we come to the future, and before 
we deal specially with London, let us consider what 
we mean by " University Extension." 

In the first place, it is not a phrase used originally 
by those who created the thing. That, at least, is my 
recollection. When my friend Professor Stuart per- 
suaded Dr. Lightfoot and Dr. Westcott, and two or 
three other Cambridge men, to join with him in de- 
veloping the system which he had devised, we called 
it by a name analogous to that of another system which 
we were working. We had local examinations, and 
we called Professor Stuart's system Local Lectures. 

There was a special fitness in this resemblance of 
name. The Universities had for some years been 
engaged in holding examinations at a number of places 
in various parts of the kingdom, for such students as 
entered for examination at these local centres. The 
question then came, Cannot the University teach at 

c 



18 UNIVERSITY EXTENSION ADDRESSES 

local centres, and not examine only ? As the function 
of the old Universities was specially to teach, within 
their own walls, and only as a subsidiary work to 
examine, it was evident that the request for teaching 
at local centres, and not examination only, came to us 
with much to recommend it. It is a matter of history 
how rapidly the desire grew, how one body and another 
took up the idea and worked it out. It is a matter of 
common knowledge how large the work now is, how 
many able men it has enlisted in its service, how many 
thousands of men and women are its attached and 
grateful supporters. 

Now note, if you please, two points. The teaching 
was to be of a University type. It was not to be 
a set of popular lectures, delivered by a lecturer or 
lecturers whose work ended when the last sentence of 
the lecture was spoken. The sort of work which was 
done in a college lecture-room was to be the type, — 
that is to say, a lecture of a solid kind, on scientific 
principles, conveying definite information on some 
special point or points, and accompanied by some 
endeavour on the part of the lecturer to ascertain how 
far the class had followed him, and how far they had 
got hold of the point or points to which he had 
addressed himself. The audience were expected to 
work quite as hard as the lecturer. The difference 
between this and a popular lecture, however able, is 
one not of degree but of kind. This is no attack 
upon the popular lecture, which is an institution excel- 
lent in its place and for popular audiences ; it is merely 
an assertion of the fact that the University local lecture 
from the first professed to be something of another 
kind. Often not nearly so attractive in itself as a 



CANON BROWNE 19 

popular lecture, often not nearly so well delivered as 
by a popular lecturer, often attended by a few scores 
only, in a room which the popular lecture would crowd 
with as many hundreds, it still stuck to its principle 
of solid information on a scientific method, and main- 
tained that for students it was a more valuable, if often 
a less brilliant thing, than the popular lecture. It 
was what the student wanted, and what the student 
ought to want, and for the student it was meant. 

The other point is this. There was no use coming 
to the University to ask for able men to be sent down 
to local centres, to teach subjects taught already in the 
schools of the place, or dealt with by a system of 
private tuition. I have seen it remarked that we do 
not teach Latin and Greek, Euclid and Algebra. The 
simple reason is, that, as from the first it was our aim 
to teach on a method different from that adopted in 
ordinary lectures, so we determined that it was not our 
business to handle subjects for the teaching of which 
provision was already made in the place. That there 
shall be the means of acquiring a knowledge of these 
subjects, easily accessible to the students who may 
desire to remedy their deficiencies in these respects, 
will, I think, in the course of time, become a care of 
the local committees in important districts. Many of 
us, no doubt, have taken part in work of the kind. I 
always remember with great pleasure a class of working 
men which I had for some two or three years in French, 
— men most of them connected with a great print- 
ing business. And there is plenty of room for a great 
deal of such work. But I have no doubt that the 
central managing bodies have been wise in their prac- 
tice of not themselves providing the teaching. You 



20 UNIVERSITY EXTENSION ADDRESSES 

must be careful, however, to see, that when it is said 
that Latin and Greek, and French and German, and 
Euclid and Algebra, have practically no place in our 
system, it is clearly understood what the real position 
of the statement is. 

And for whom was this higher type of teaching 
intended ? The simple answer is, for all who wished 
for teaching of the higher type, and could not get it 
elsewhere. As a fact, I believe that the first calls 
came from a group of ladies in a great town — now a 
city — in the north-west of England ; from co-operators 
at a great industrial centre ; and from workmen at a 
great focus of railway works. I think that among 
those who took a lead in the first of these calls, now 
quite twenty years ago, one was foremost whose loss 
the cause of women's education all over the world is 
now mourning, at whose funeral, with its unique and 
striking accompaniments, I was officiating a fortnight 
ago at this hour, — I mean Miss Anne Clough, of Newn- 
ham. Women have since that time worked out the 
problem of their highest education in a very remark- 
able manner indeed, and their educational zeal and 
success in direct University work are one of the 
features of the age. But those who have managed the 
local lectures have found that there is no limit of 
sex, age, occupation, or position, among those who 
invoke their aid for the supply of guidance and in- 
struction in study of an earnest character. They have 
found, too, that the rise in the standard of elementary 
education, and the many means young people have now 
of carrying their elementary education further, have very 
largely increased the numbers of those who can profit 
by the system of University Extension. 



CANON BROWNE 21 

We come, then, to this, that the local lectures were 
an extension of the University in two respects. First, 
in geographical area — we took our University methods 
into all parts of the kingdom to which we were- asked 
to take them; and, secondly, in the kind of persons 
taught — we extended University teaching to whole 
classes of persons who were altogether outside the 
classes from which most of our resident University 
students were drawn. 

But it soon became evident that there was to be 
yet another meaning in University Extension. I have 
said that we did not teach such things as Latin and 
Greek, Euclid and Algebra, the ordinary basis of educa- 
tion of the higher kind, because it was for others to do 
that. But was it impossible to apply what I have 
called University methods to subjects which did not 
ordinarily form part of the studies of the University ? 
The three sets of people whom I have mentioned, as 
making the first calls for University Extension, or 
Local Lectures as I always called the system officially, 
and as my University still officially calls it, asked, I 
think, for lectures in Astronomy, Political Economy, 
and Mechanics. Those were all of them subjects of 
University study, and able men were found willing to 
go. But a large number of those who invoked our 
help begged for assistance in studying subjects which 
were scarcely or not all included among what were 
called University subjects. Now I have seen since 
my undergraduate days a very remarkable extension 
in the number and character of University subjects — 
subjects, that is, whose study is encouraged and re- 
warded at the Universities. When I went up to 
Cambridge, Latin and Greek and Mathematics were 



22 UNIVERSITY EXTENSION ADDRESSES 

the great subjects, the only subjects in which degrees 
in honours could be taken ; and for men who were not 
ambitious of intellectual honours there were added, to 
a modicum of the subjects mentioned, Evidences of 
Christianity, and some simple Moral Philosophy, and 
some parts of the Old and New Testaments. It is 
forty years since I first became a member of the 
University, and in those forty years the following sub- 
jects have been added to those in which men can take 
a degree in honours : — Moral Sciences, Natural Sciences, 
Theology, Law, History, Semitic Languages, Indian 
Languages, Mediaeval and Modern Languages. That 
is, I suppose, a much larger area of University Exten- 
sion, within the University itself, than all the previous 
history of the University can show. And for men 
who are not ambitious of intellectual honours as the 
result of their Cambridge course, there are many 
avenues to a degree, when once the common require- 
ments of Latin, Greek, Euclid, Algebra, and Mechanics 
have been met, which were not open to men when I 
was an undergraduate. Indeed, many of them date 
from very recent times. The man who does not 
read for honours can now devote the second and 
larger part of his three years to any one of the follow- 
ing subjects, by any one of which he can proceed to 
the ordinary B.A. degree, and not one of which was 
open to men at the time I speak of : — Theology, Logic, 
Political Economy, History, Chemistry, Geology, Botany, 
Zoology, Physiology, Mechanism and Applied Science, 
Music, Modern Languages. There are, besides, other 
avenues to the ordinary degree — Mathematics, Classics, 
Law. Thus we have in all, in place of the two triposes 
for honour men, and the one common poll examina- 



CANON BROWNE 23 

tion for all poll men, of forty years ago, no less than 
ten triposes, and fifteen avenues to the ordinary B.A. 
degree. 

Nor does this exhaust the Extension to which I am 
calling your attention. Many of the tripos examina- 
tions have become themselves a sort of nest of triposes. 
The old classical tripos, for instance, was an examina- 
tion in scholarship. But now the scholar is invited, 
after having given proof of the sufficiency of his 
scholarship, to specialise in one of five branches of 
study, namely, Pure Scholarship, the Philosophy of 
Greece and Eome, the History of Greece and Eome, the 
Archaeology of Greece and Eome, the Language of 
Greece and Eome. And in any of these branches the 
able student can obtain the highest honours the 
University can bestow. And so I might go through 
one and another of the ten triposes, and show what a 
hydra - headed thing the three - legged creature has 
become. 

That is a marvellous University Extension, within 
the walls of the University itself; and who shall say 
that we have reached finality ? It is true that in each 
case we demand from the student evidence that he has 
acquired knowledge to a certain extent of Latin and 
Greek and Mathematics — and the minimum standard 
is not so low as it is sometimes supposed to be — but 
we allow the student to give this evidence at the very 
beginning of his University course, or before he has 
entered upon his course at all, and we regard the 
honour student as spending practically the whole of 
his course, and the poll student as spending quite half 
his course, in studying that one of the many other 
branches which he selects. University Extension, as 



24 UNIVERSITY EXTENSION ADDRESSES 

we use the phrase in our society, becomes pregnant 
with the possibility of meanings, when we regard it in 
the light of such considerations as the recent history of 
the Universities themselves afford. He would be a 
bold man who would venture to say that University 
Extension has not large developments yet in store for 
us or our successors. To go no further than the pre- 
sent, in my own University they are considering the 
establishment of a Physical Sciences and Mechanical 
Sciences tripos, in principal connection with the School 
of Engineering. And I need not tell you with what 
valour and pungency a number of our friends are 
demanding that English literature shall be treated by 
the universities as an educational subject of the 
highest value, its scientific study worthy of the best 
encouragement and reward they can give. 

It is as well to remark, in passing, that it is not 
every English University that requires from all its 
students a preliminary knowledge of all these sub- 
jects, Latin, Greek, Euclid, and Algebra. With us, in 
Cambridge, I daresay the requirement indicates the 
sort of men we wish to have as students within our 
walls, rather than suggests that, in our opinion, a man 
cannot be a serious student, worthy of being recognised 
as such, who has not a preliminary knowledge of all 
of those four branches of learning. For myself, I 
hope that we shall not cease to require this from the 
students who come to Cambridge to prepare for a 
degree. But that does not in the least interfere with 
the respect I feel for the earnest student whose school- 
days gave him no opportunity for learning what other 
boys of his age learned as a mere matter of course. 
He turns, as an adult man, to the study of that which 



CANON BROWNE 25 

is within his reach, no doubt often with the wish 
that his reach were wider ; and he turns to the study 
with a zest and a success which I heartily wish those 
others showed a little more than they sometimes do. 

There is yet another sense in which experience has 
taught us that " University Extension " may be taken. 
In the resident Universities men come to us for three 
years, take their degree, and go. The great mass of 
them have no further connection with the University, 
so far as study is concerned. Now I take it that a 
considerable number of those who attend a course of 
University Extension lectures desire to continue to 
attend such courses, and see no reason why they 
should not for years go on attending them. Some, I 
know, regard attendance at these lectures as the most 
interesting feature in their lives, a feature of increas- 
ingly satisfactory interest. What a delightful mean- 
ing of " University Extension " it would be, that 
students extended the time during which they attended 
teaching of a University type from three years to six, 
from six years to nine; that students regarded this steady 
intellectual work not as the work of three years, to be 
followed by a degree and then abandoned for practical 
life, but as the constant companion of practical life ; 
not as a happy memory of the past, but as a fresh and 
living integral part of a happy fruitful present. That, 
I know, is the meaning that many a University 
Extension student has found in the phrase University 
Extension. 

And now as to our future in London. What can 
we hope for, what do we deserve ? 

We have a right to feel certain of the approval of 
the statesman. I suppose that among the objects and 



26 UNIVERSITY EXTENSION ADDRESSES 

aims of the true statesman, in these days of cheap 
newspapers- and of free discussion, this must rank 
high, — that his countrymen should be able to form 
true judgments as to the bearing of the facts and the 
arguments which they read and hear. Do not 
imagine that I suggest that the true statesman will 
wish, as a matter of course, to neutralise the effects of 
a cheap press and free discussion. I am making no 
reference whatever to the character of that w T hich 
people read and hear. I simply mean what I say, 
that the man who has the interests of his country at 
heart will wish that the people should be so trained as 
to be able to form fairly sound judgments on facts and 
arguments put before them. Now, as I cast my eye 
down the long lists of subjects in the reports on your 
work, I find a large number of subjects which are just 
such as are serviceable from this point of view. I 
suggested at the outset that if we are to understand 
the present of University Extension, and to prepare for 
its future, it is well to have an eye to the facts and 
the lessons of the past. I need not say that in no 
part of the work of your society is greater interest 
taken than in the history of special periods of our 
own national life ; and I have observed that when a 
centre becomes practised in the study of such history, 
there arises a desire for some knowledge of compara- 
tive history. Classes who have studied the history of 
Elizabeth's time in England form a wish to study the 
contemporary history of the Low Countries ; at a later 
date they desire to know something of the reign of 
Louis XIV. I feel sure that a real statesman would 
earnestly desire to see these two branches of history, 
our own history and comparative European history, 



CANON BROWNE 27 

carefully studied by as many as possible of those for 
whose welfare he labours : — our own history, that they 
may realise the ceaseless drift, the continuous move- 
ment, of the nation's life; comparative history, that 
they may learn of how many combining influences ex- 
ternal to ourselves the statesman has to take account. 

And, apart from the subject of study, the fact of 
study should ensure for us the sympathetic help of 
men who are — to whatever party in the State they 
incline — worthily in a position of authority and 
power. There are nations in Europe where the 
students are a body liable to dangerous explosions of 
political feeling. There are places nearer home where 
the students keep in fairly active habits of body and 
mind the officials who attend to their disciplinary 
well-being. But the students whom the statesman 
sees, when he glances our way, are men and women 
who spend the little leisure they have from their work 
in life in quiet, peaceful study ; students whose studies 
predispose them to orderliness, students who in times 
of disturbance would be found a nucleus of staidness ; 
students who can look beyond the excitement of the 
moment and analyse the forces that produce it, and 
estimate the mischief it will work; students who to 
the warning lessons of history have added the civilis- 
ing, softening charms of the noblest literature in the 
world. Not only so, but another of the most attract- 
ive and successful branches of your work should 
appeal strongly to the instincts of the statesman — I 
mean the work in natural science — work which is done 
on the University principle of making clear the 
reasons for observed facts, rather than centring the 
interest upon a description of the facts. When we 



28 UNIVERSITY EXTENSION ADDRESSES 

hear so much as we have to hear of industries in 
which we were pre-eminent falling gradually into the 
hands of other nations ; when we hear of the inven- 
tions and applications of inventions which enable 
other nations to meet us in the open market ; when 
we think of what it would mean to the destinies and 
to the civilising work of our Empire, if it fell behind in 
the material race, — I cannot conceive anyone, who 
understands the interests of the Empire, being indiffer- 
ent to the fact that at scores of centres, to hundreds 
and thousands of men and women, we teach from a 
scientific standpoint the elements of the natural sciences. 

We have a right to feel certain of the approval of 
the philanthropist. Very early in the experience of 
those who managed the first attempt at University 
Extension, it became evident that we were doing 
much more than an intellectual work. We were 
giving an interest in life, and an interest of a worthy 
kind, to many and many a one who sorely needed 
something outside and different from the ordinary 
routine of life. We were brightening existence to 
them. And many a solitary student, who had none to 
sympathise with his work, none to guide him, none to 
lead him to higher effort, came forth from his solitari- 
ness, and found companionship in study, found guid- 
ance, found breadth. Pleasant as are many of the 
evidences of real usefulness which abound in the 
experience of all who have helped on this work 
through a series of years, none have been to me more 
pleasant than the assurance that in doing a work 
educational, intellectual, we have done a work of true 
philanthropy. 

We have a right to claim the approval and support 



CANON BROWNE 29 

of all who are versed in educational work, and take a 
broad view of the possibilities of such work. Here, in 
London, we present to the consideration of such 
persons a problem quite different from that of Oxford 
and Cambridge, quite different from that of any non- 
University town, however large. We offer for his 
consideration the existence of thousands of earnest 
students, living the ordinary course of their lives 
within the area of what we call London, not living 
here because they are students, but students because 
they live here. This is an adjunct to the ordinary 
work of a University such as no other University 
possesses. It has grown up of itself, without en- 
couragement, grown to its present dimensions by the 
sheer force of the principle which is its life. To what 
it may not grow if it is encouraged, systematised, who 
shall say ? Who shall venture to impose a limit 
upon its growth, upon its possibilities ? Of this I 
feel sure, that no important educational step, affecting 
the higher education of and in London, will be taken 
successfully, which does not in some way or other 
make use of this great means. And if the time 
should ever come when men rise to a really bold 
conception of a great educational system for London, 
which shall unite for the common end the many 
educational institutions now in existence here, shall 
unite them without interfering with the individuality 
of any one of them — for that alone is a reasonable 
union, — I take it as certain that in that great compre- 
hensive system, laid on lines that allow for develop- 
ments, dim as yet in the distant future, this system of 
yours will play — it may be a subordinate — but it will 
be an integral part. 



30 UNIVERSITY EXTENSION ADDRESSES 

It is, of course, the aspiration of such of you as are 
continuous students, that in some way or other a 
crown should be set upon your work. If you are true 
students, study itself is your aim, study itself is your 
reward. But taking, as I will in your name, that 
highest ground, it is a legitimate aspiration that some 
public recognition should be accessible to you. Who 
would venture to say that young men would flock in 
hundreds and thousands as they now do to Oxford and 
Cambridge, if those Universities offered only, as an 
inducement to come there and study, the charms of a 
studious life, the attractions of able teachers ? They 
are degree-giving bodies, as well as teaching bodies, 
and the two functions, the two ideas, have become 
inseparably connected in men's minds. It was not 
always so. In the early middle ages, when we read 
of very large numbers of persons attending the 
Universities, a large majority of them did not contem- 
plate proceeding to a degree. They came for a time 
to attend the teaching of some man of great reputa- 
tion ; and then they passed on. But now, there are 
very few cases of men coming with any more transient 
purpose than to get a degree. Are we, then, to limit 
our meaning in the phrase " University Extension " to 
one of the two great functions of a University, the most 
important, no doubt, from an intellectual point of view, 
but still only one of the two ? That, I understand, is 
a question that is exercising the minds of many of you. 
It is a question which it is impossible to avoid when 
we give even a very slight amount of thought to the 
future of University Extension. 

I feel fairly clear as to the answer. But I am not 
at all so clear as to the answer, which the facts of the 



CANON BROWNE 31 

case telegraph to me, being an answer which will be 
wholly satisfactory to you. This is not a case where 
you would proceed in a bargaining spirit, asking for 
more than you really aim at, in the hope of at least 
getting what you want. It is emphatically a case for 
facing the position frankly, and formulating your hope, 
wish, request, demand, — call it what you will, — in 
accordance with the result of that frank consideration. 

To put first the extreme demand, it would be this, 
that those who pursue for a certain period, with 
success, your course of study, should be able, on that 
course of study, to obtain in the end the degree of 
Bachelor of Arts or Bachelor of Science. And that 
without fulfilling the conditions which are in ordinary 
cases attached to candidature for those degrees, in the 
way of preliminary examination in other subjects 
specified by the University. 

Now I am not at all prepared to say that an excel- 
lent training cannot be obtained without a knowledge 
of those preliminary subjects. It may well be that as 
time goes on, University Extension may lead to an 
extension of the University idea, so that there may 
come about a University curriculum which differs 
largely in the character of its common requirements 
from those which now prevail. I could understand, 
for instance, a University in a great centre of popula- 
tion taking a position essentially different from that 
of the old Universities. They draw their students 
from other places, and educate them apart from the 
great busy centres, in subjects which, as they believe, 
are best calculated to draw out the highest powers of 
the intellect, in those who have the leisure to give the 
whole day to such work, and have the preliminary 



32 UNIVERSITY EXTENSION ADDRESSES 

acquirements which are given in schools of the highest 
grade. I could understand this, while still believing 
that for those who could resort to that other teaching 
it would continue to be the best of all. And if any 
such development should occur in our time, I regard 
it as certain that what we call University Extension 
would find that its time of full recognition had indeed 
come. But so long as the University idea remains 
what it has now for some considerable time been, I am 
inclined to deprecate the demand that the degrees 
given on the well known and understood principles 
which now prevail, should be given equally on 
principles quite different, — quite different, though, as 
many think, much better suited to the circumstances 
of many students than the others are. And I happen 
to know this, that the Council of the Society deprecates 
such a demand. 

Another method is to have some special degree 
devised, to be conferred upon those who go through 
your course with success. It has never seemed to me 
that this would be a satisfactory method. The degree 
would not compete on equal terms with the degrees 
whose reputation is already established. It would be 
regarded as meaning less than they, though no doubt 
in some cases it would mean more. The intention 
would be only to denote by it something different from 
the other degrees ; in public acceptance this would be 
misunderstood, and it would be supposed to be not 
different only, but inferior. And I feel sure that if 
earnest, determined students, such as many of you are, 
once got such a degree, they would never rest till they 
got what people would call the real thing. And this 
in itself would belittle the special degree. 



CANON BROWNE 33 

I would not ask for a degree on easier terms than 
other people. I would not ask for a degree inferior 
to other people. I would ask for a fitting recognition 
of worthy work. My own idea would be that an 
arrangement of this kind might be made. It should 
be possible for you, on fulfilling some stringent condi- 
tions as to continuity and sequence and blending of 
study, to obtain some such title as Associate of a 
University. The conditions should be such that 
persons who understand what higher education is and 
means should be able to recognise them as securing 
attainment sufficient for a degree, so far as it goes, but 
not sufficient in so far as it does not reach the pre- 
liminary subjects, without which a degree is not given. 

If that could be arranged, if the breadth and depth 
of the work done were such as to be really worthy of 
this recognition, this Associateship would be a highly- 
prized achievement, and would be recognised as such. 
The man or woman would be marked as a person of 
attainments and culture, would be entitled to regard 
himself or herself as a serious student, a successful 
student ; and nothing could be more likely than that 
to make of him or her that which I so much desire 
to see many men and women made, — a continuous 
student, one who does not know what it is to talk of 
education being finished, but, on the contrary, only 
finds each new pleasure of knowledge an incitement 
to yet another entry upon that boundless field. 

Beyond this Associateship there would be one 
simple step to the degree. The associate would have 
to qualify in the preliminary subjects common to all 
candidates for a degree. He would earn his degree 
by his University Extension work. That would be his 

D 



34 UNIVERSITY EXTENSION ADDRESSES 

honours. He would proceed to his degree by the quali- 
fying process of passing the preliminary requirements. 
That would be his poll. 

There would be one great gain to you in federation 
under some comprehensive educational system. It is 
your difficulty, it is your privilege, to be self-sup- 
porting. The fees paid by the students, low as they 
are, have to provide for the payment of the lecturers, 
low as it is. If you look at the accounts published 
last December, you will see how very curiously close 
the relation is between the amount that is paid in fees 
and the amount that is paid, directly on your account, 
to lecturers, examiners, and printers. The receipts 
for lecture fees, examinations, and syllabuses are 
£2076:18:6; and the payments to lecturers, ex- 
aminers, and printers are £2077:2:6, being an 
excess over receipts of four shillings. All the rest 
of the numerous expenses, for management, general 
printing, and so on, are met by voluntary contri- 
butions. This is much about the state of things in 
Cambridge also ; that is to say, the receipts from those 
attending the lectures do not meet the expenses of 
central management, and funds for those expenses 
have to be found elsewhere. So when we say that 
the system is self-supporting, we only mean, that, 
roughly speaking, the receipts from students and local 
committees about cover the payments to the lecturers 
and examiners. Now it is clear that the fees of 
students must play an important part in this adjust- 
ment ; and this means that the students, each of whom 
pays a very small fee, must be numerous. What does 
that in its turn mean ? It means that the subjects 
must be such as draw and interest a considerable 



CANON BROWNE 35 

number of people. That every lecture should be 
interesting to those who are studying the subject of 
the lecture, I hold to be of the greatest importance ; 
but it is a very serious thing that in consequence of 
financial pressure you must, as a rule, have subjects 
which are interesting to a considerable number of 
people. What is to be done for the more advanced 
students, who desire to push on to subjects, or parts 
of subjects, which choke off, and ought to choke off, 
those who are not sufficiently advanced to attend the 
lectures with profit ? How, that is, are you, con- 
sistently with the two conditions — that the fee is to be 
low and that the lectures are to be self-supporting — 
how are you to procure lectures in subjects which appeal 
to only a few ? As far as I can see, only by federa- 
tion. If you were part of a great educational system, 
with its hands upon the whole of London and its 
mind open to your wants, we should soon have centres 
for the delivery of lectures on what I may call as a 
matter of definition non-paying subjects. To these 
centres advanced and determined students, scattered 
in twos and threes at points round the circumference, 
could converge in sufficient numbers to float the 
lectures. In that way, and only in that way, I think, 
you could have courses of lectures in subjects rising 
in difficulty as your preparedness rises. But while 
that device might answer, the fact is that, to have this 
worked properly, you very much need to have access 
to some central institution. You want some important 
body which has a life of its own, independent of you 
to lend itself, or a part of itself, to the furtherance 01 
your higher interests as advanced students. Some 
four years ago it fell to my lot to return thanks, in 



36 UNIVERSITY EXTENSION ADDRESSES 

the Mercers' Hall, for the Governors of St. Paul's 
School, of whom I have for some years had the honour 
of being one. And I should like to remark that the 
full share in the management given by the Mercers 
to their University colleagues, the full weight given to 
the views of the University governors, render my 
governorship of that magnificent school one of the 
very pleasantest educational offices I hold. On that 
occasion I ventured to call the attention of a dis- 
tinguished company of guests to the problem which 
we have been discussing this afternoon ; and I ventured 
still further to. name the institution which, as it seemed 
to me, was marked out by its conditions and principles 
in a very singular manner for putting itself at the 
head of this educational work. It was the Gresham 
College. If you could have Sir Thomas Gresham 
standing among you this afternoon, I cannot but think 
that he would find in you the kind of students for 
whom he exercised so much forethought and liberality. 
If it were possible that, besides the educational 
apparatus at the command of the Gresham Grand 
Committee, a great site in the city could be secured, 
which is to be vacated by one of our great schools, 
with a noble hall, which it will be a scandal to London 
for London to lose, with residential blocks of buildings 
erected in the foreground, arranged as homes for 
advanced students from all the scores of active local 
centres which are dotted thickly about the suburbs, 
homes for such of them as can do the daily work of 
their life as well from one lodging as from another, 
with it may be a Gresham professor, or a Gresham 
lecturer, or a Gresham assistant lecturer — for when 
you once begin to develop you must build your ideal 



CANON BROWNE 37 

system large — living in each block, then, I think, your 
system would be complete, and London would be 
doing a work of University Extension in the fullest 
sense of the word such as no other city in Europe, as 
far as I know, is doing. 

What should your present attitude be, in view 
of the rumours which are floating about somewhat 
anxiously in the educational world ? I think it should 
be one of quiet hopeful expectancy. If I may pre- 
sume to offer counsel at so grave a conjuncture as 
this, the counsel I would give is this, that you should 
insure the future by your good use of the present, and 
should have the faith and confidence that come of such 
insurance. Take care that at whatever time the 
judicious eye of the educationally-disposed statesman 
falls upon your work, you are seen to be a compact 
body of earnest students ; students for study's sake ; 
students moving on, moving up, in the path of study ; 
resolute, self-respecting, and self-denying. If that is 
what the judicious eye sees, be sure the judicious mind 
will give you a worthy place in his system. You 
have not buildings, appliances, endowments, to put at 
his disposal; silver and gold you have none. But 
you have that to give him which he will most value — 
a stout and stalwart and numerous band of students 
ready equipped. As I am addressing University 
Extension students, and not University students, I can 
assume an acquaintance on your part with English 
literature. Do you remember the wager that Allan 
M'Aulay made when he was shown the massive silver 
candelabra of the Musgraves down in England ? He 
bet two hundred merks that he had more candlesticks, 
and better candlesticks, in his own castle at home in 



38 UNIVERSITY EXTENSION ADDRESSES 

Perthshire than were ever lighted in a hall in Cumber- 
land. When the English went north and tested his 
grounds for the wager, they found behind each chair 
in the banquet-room a tall Highlander fully armed, 
bearing a blazing pine torch. " Those," M'Aulay said, 
" those are my candlesticks." The wager was clearly 
won. Men, and such men, were worth more than 
silver. 



HEAKING, BEADING, AND THINKING 1 

By the Eight Hon. G.^.'Goschen, D.C.L., M.P. 

1886 

Having undertaken to address you on "Hearing, 
Eeading, and Thinking," I must begin by denning 
my terms. By " hearing " I mean the process of taking 
in intellectual food by the ear ; by " reading " that of 
taking it in by the eye ; and by " thinking " a form of 
mental activity which sometimes accompanies hearing 
and reading, and which can also be set at work separ- 
ately, but which, I fear, listeners and readers do not 
always summon to their aid. Honestly, I must say 
I believe that a vast number of readers do not 
allow what I may call the frenzied current of their 
eyes, as they read, to be stopped for even a moment 
of calm reflection or thought. Outside the charmed 
circle of students who are studying under the auspices 
of our Society, and as to whose habit of following the 
lectures with reasoning and continuous thought, I 
would not venture to breathe a doubt, I expect there 
are a great many who will not go through the fatigue, 
the great fatigue, of giving a continuous critical 

1 This address was delivered extempore, and is therefore more collo- 
quial and less carefully expressed than most of the addresses of this 
series. — G. J. G. 



40 UNIVERSITY EXTENSION ADDRESSES 

accompaniment of thinking to the words of the 
lecturers to whom they listen. 

I shall say something about " thinking " by and 
by. In the first instance I wish to give you my reasons 
for believing that those of you who come to our 
lectures, derive benefits from hearing which you 
could not derive from reading. Of course we must 
compare like with like, a good book with a good 
lecture, an indifferent book with indifferent oral 
instruction. Now in the latter case I am not 
sure that the balance of advantage lies with the 
lecture. For with a dull book you have, at any rate, 
the remedy in your hands. You can put on the pace. 
But, oh ! the penance of having to sit out a dull lecture, 
or, indeed, a dull oral performance of any kind, when 
you can apply neither whip nor spur, but must listen to 
the end. On the other hand, I shall claim, when you 
come to compare excellence with excellence, that the 
excellence of the spoken teaching offers delights which 
the perusal of written teaching will scarcely ever afford. 

The particular form of hearing to which, in 
addressing an audience largely composed as this is 
of University Extension students, I naturally direct 
attention, is the hearing of lectures. The word 
" lecture," it is interesting to note, means, literally, a 
reading, or rather a reading out ; and you may regard 
it from two points of view — substance and form. In 
substance, a lecture is primarily a condensation. It 
represents in brief space the final result of a vast 
amount of study on the lecturer's part. It is his 
business to collect from the number of books dealing 
with his subject the salient facts and ideas, and to 
present them in the manner most suitable to his 



MR. GOSCHEN 41 

hearers. The lecturer is thus primarily a condensing 
machine. Or, if I may be allowed, in deference to the 
fairer portion of my audience, a more pleasing simile, 
the lecturer presents you with a bouquet of cut 
flowers ; he plucks the flowers for you and blends the 
colours. But, alas ! for my simile, cut flowers die 
soon, and crammed facts fade rapidly from the memory. 
Perhaps, therefore, I may take another simile, more 
complimentary and more appropriate. Let me rather 
put it that the lecturer is a herbalist, who collects 
the perfume and the strength of a variety of herbs and 
flowers, and condenses them into a phial, where they may 
be preserved, and whence they can be taken in small 
doses and in such a manner as to vivify and to 
strengthen the constitution of those who appropriate 
the results of his labours. But whatever simile you 
adopt, you will see that the first function of the 
lecturer is to bring together, in a short form, that 
which it would be a great difficulty for you to collect, 
if you had to do the work entirely" for yourselves. 

But I have not only to speak of the lecture as a form 
of literary work ; I have to establish the claim of the 
lecturer to be heard rather than read. Would it not 
be shorter, simpler, and less troublesome if his lectures 
were simply printed and circulated ? What do you 
gain by coming to lectures, instead of reading them ? 
You gain some advantages which are independent of 
the character of the lecturer. The first is the stimulus 
of intellectual companionship. There is an incentive 
to study in the mere knowledge that others are study- 
ing with you ; the search after truth becomes easier 
when you have comrades on the road. In reading a 
book you are alone ; in hearing a lecture you are one 



42 UNIVERSITY EXTENSION ADDRESSES 

of an intellectual company. And then there is the 
infectious excitement of a large audience. Besides, 
the mere regularity of the lecture, once a week or 
as often as it may be, is of great advantage. " What is 
the good of going to a lecture," people say, " when we 
could read a book which would tell us just the same 
things ? " You could read a book, no doubt ; but the 
question is, would you ? In this desultory and distract- 
ing age the compulsion of a weekly lecture — a compul- 
sion which is self-imposed, it is true, but which might 
not be forthcoming if there were no lecture to go to — 
is of itself a great aid to serious and systematic study. 
These advantages are, I say, more or less independ- 
ent of the lecturer. But, beyond these, the spoken 
lecture has, if the lecturer be a master of his art, the 
following advantages over the lecture which is merely 
read. In a well-delivered lecture you find, first of all, 
light and shade. The voice and manner of the 
lecturer will do more than can be done by any arts of 
style. Emphasis is better than italics. The human 
voice can recall the wandering attention, while the 
printed word has no such means of self-assertion. I 
know there are people whose intellectual appreciation is 
so keen and fine, that reading affords them a luxurious 
enjoyment which the finest speech or lecture cannot give. 
Some musical people, I am told, by reading the score 
of an opera, can taste the full joy of its performance by 
an orchestra. To some people reading brings so rich 
a store of intellectual association, such a " corona " of 
clear thought, that they do not need inflection of voice 
and change of manner to realise the full force of the 
meaning to be conveyed. But these are exceptions. 
To most men, even intellectual men, how ^reat a 



o 



MR. GOSCHEN 43 

contrast there is between reading ten lines of Shake- 
speare and hearing them delivered by a first-rate actor ! 
I appeal to the experience of any man, however 
intellectual, whether, when he takes up his Shakespeare 
and reads a passage of ten or twenty lines, he sees 
the thoughts that cluster around them as vividly as 
when he hears those lines recited by a master of 
the dramatic art, and whether, when he hears them so 
recited, he does not find that Shakespeare had put 
into them infinitely more than is ever dreamed of by 
the reading student. 

These advantages of hearing over reading are not 
confined to great dramatic performances. I say, without 
fear of being challenged, that, when you read, you cannot 
get the whole of what is spoken. Besides the active 
language of the lecture, sermon, or speech, a vast deal 
is conveyed in emphasis, — in what I may call the rallen- 
tando and the crescendo of the speaker, — which cannot 
be understood by any other means than by listening. 
I remember hearing an excellent sermon upon the 
text, " How old art thou ? "—in which the preacher 
modulated this phrase in every possible way, so as to 
adapt it to every illustration which he gave. Some- 
times he put the accent upon " old " — " How old art 
thou ? " At the most striking times he put the 
accent upon " thou," and, addressing himself to each of 
his hearers, he asked — " How old art thou ? " I would 
defy the most skilful of the reporters sitting at the 
table before me so to have reported that sermon as 
to convey to the readers of it the same ideas which 
the speaker conveyed to the congregation. Again, 
let me give you an illustration from the House of 
Commons. A member makes an apology to another, 



44 UNIVERSITY EXTENSION ADDRESSES 

and the latter says : " I accept the apology in the 
spirit in which it was made." Now, according to 
the inflection of the voice, that sentence may be 
either a genial compliment, or an ironical insinnation, 
or a ferocions insult. It depends upon the voice, 
and what could even the reporters, who accomplish 
marvels in the way of reproducing the most slip- 
shod speeches, make of cases such as this ? It 
has happened to me that a friend who was passing 
out of the House of Commons, said, " I will not 
wait to hear you speak ; I will read you to-morrow." 
No, he will not read me; he will read my speech. 
He will know my thoughts to a certain extent, but he 
will not know in a hundred ways the impression I 
intended to convey, for there are tones, pauses, 
innuendoes, gestures, forms of inflection of mind and of 
thought, which can be rendered in a speech but cannot 
be rendered in a report, however able and accurate. 

If it is said that this applies more to political 
speeches than to lectures, no doubt it is true. But, 
in the presence possibly of one or two lecturers — 
I am not criticising them — let me express the hope 
that the lecturers imitate public speakers at least 
to this extent, that they avail themselves to the full 
of those advantages which the power of addressing 
audiences vivd voce gives them. I would, on the 
other hand, express the hope to public speakers that 
they will imitate lecturers by packing more thought 
and substance into their speeches. Let public speakers 
remember how strenuously lecturers work in order 
to secure that condensed substance of which I have 
spoken, to their hearers, while I repeat that lecturers 
will increase the interest of their lectures the more 



MR. GOSCHEN 45 

they remember the power possessed by voice and 
delivery to excite and maintain the interest of those 
whom they are addressing. I wish the majority of 
political speeches were more like lectures in wealth of 
thought, and the majority of lectures more like good 
political speeches in effectiveness of delivery. 

Now, these physical advantages of voice and man- 
ner may attach, if not to the full extent, to a written 
lecture simply read out by the lecturer. But the 
lecturer may claim another advantage, if he is sufficiently 
self-confident, if he is sufficiently master of his subject, 
and sufficiently ready of speech to rely for his expres- 
sions, to some extent, on the inspiration of the moment. 
I am not saying anything against the most careful 
preparation. I believe in the coining of phrases by 
care. I believe in the most careful arrangement of 
the subject. But while I believe in arrangement and 
in the careful choice of phrases, the lecturer must not 
be the slave of either. He should be able to adapt him- 
self to the understanding and humour of the audience ; 
to expand, when they are slow of comprehension ; to 
illustrate, when they are dull ; to curtail or omit — a 
most important object — when they have had enough of 
a particular point. 

Further, the lecturer — if he has the necessary 
gift — has a third advantage, that of exciting interest 
in, and enthusiasm for, his subject by his inspiring 
personality. True, a book may have a similar effect, 
but personal contact is more likely to produce it. 
Inspiring writing is rarer than inspiring speech. There 
are more men who can interest you in their subject 
by talking about it than who can do so by writing 
about it. Of course it is not every one who has the 



46 UNIVERSITY EXTENSION ADDRESSES 

former gift; but I claim that many of our lecturers 
do possess this inspiring personality, and excite your 
interest and arouse your enthusiasm, not only by 
what they say, but also by what they are themselves. 
At any rate I hold that lecturers have not fulfilled 
their full functions unless they impress their hearers 
by establishing a strong personal influence over their 
intellectual sympathies. 

If this is true of all lectures, it is especially 
true of our University Extension lectures. For 
they are not, primarily, lectures on what I have 
elsewhere called bread-winning subjects. In the case 
of such studies the art of the lecturer is of less 
moment, because the interest is already supplied by 
the necessity of winning a livelihood. But with 
lectures which are directed to culture, it is of the 
highest importance that the lecturer should be able to 
inspire enthusiasm in his subject. And, besides, the 
amount of time which our students — many of whom 
are busily engaged all day — can spend in these lectures 
is so short, that unless they carry away such an 
interest as will lead them to study on their own 
account, they will not benefit much. There are two 
kinds of teaching — the teaching which simply conveys 
information, and the teaching which, besides conveying 
information, supplies the impetus and the means to 
self - improvement. You will see the drift of my 
meaning if I compare these two kinds of teaching with 
two kinds of charity. The former kind of instruction 
is like the charity that is content with a dole. It 
supplies, for the moment, a mental need, fills the mind 
for a time, and there is an end of it. It resembles the 
charity which fills the stomach for the time, but then 



MR. GOSCHEN 47 

leaves its recipient as it found him. The higher kind 
of instruction not only supplies information but stimu- 
lates interest, and points the way by which the 
student may develop himself and become self-reliant. 
It resembles the charity which gives tools, or teaches a 
new trade, or finds new means of employment — which 
aims, not merely at alleviating want, but at creating 
independence. I hope our lecturers will be able to 
supply our students, not with mere doles, but with 
tools by which they themselves will become workmen 
in the cause of education, in the cause of culture, 
and, therefore, in the cause of civilisatioD. The aim 
of our teaching is to increase the number of self-reliant 
workmen. 

" Hearing," in the case of our lectures, ought, there- 
fore, to lead to " reading " ; and with regard to reading, 
you may ask two questions, What to read ? and how 
to read ? I do not mean to discuss what to read to- 
day. I will only remind you that if you read well, 
you will not be able to read over -much. Sir John 
Lubbock has lately given a list of the Best Hundred 
Books, and many different authorities have criticised 
him. Perhaps the best criticism was that which was 
sent to the Pall Mall Gazette by a leader of thought 
at Oxford (Mr. Jowett), to this effect : " I don't think I 
can improve on Sir J. Lubbock's list. Neither have 
I any objection to make to it, except that it is too long." 
" Too long ! " I think I hear you exclaim : " Why, we 
all of us read far more than a hundred books — novels 
of course included — every two or three years." Yes, 
that is just the great danger to genuine study in 
our time. We all read, in a way, far more than we 
can read properly. The mere multiplicity of books 



48 UNIVERSITY EXTENSION ADDRESSES 

threatens to kill reading. It is not the multiplicity 
itself which is the evil. On the contrary, when the 
books are good, it is an advantage. The evil lies in 
the idea that one must read everything, especially all 
the new books that come out. " Have you read such 
and such a book ? " " No." " Then order it from the 
library at once." This is the course that people con- 
stantly take. They do not ask, " How does the book 
fit into a course of systematic reading ? " Besides, 
they think they have read that book when they merely 
cast their eyes over its pages. I presume they read 
it in a fashion ; but • do they think at all of what they 
read ? I would very earnestly put it to our students 
that it is not necessary to read everything that comes 
out ; that systematic reading will give more enjoyment 
and secure more profit, than this desire to read every- 
thing. Do not imitate the practice which prevails at 
German tables dlidte, where the guests partake of every 
dish that is offered, and go through the whole, however 
long it may be. I would rather say — order your 
books, as you may dine, a la carte, in such quantities 
as you wish, and of such quality as you wish, and 
do not go through a long list of books merely because 
it is the fashion to read them. 

This multiplicity of books, joined to the belief that 
you must read so much, leads, in the first place, to 
excessive condensation on the part of authors. As 
people's powers of reading are limited, and still they 
want to read everything, the condensing process is at- 
tempted more and more. Formerly, we had Quarterly 
reviews which criticised and analysed books, and 
gathered together all the current literature on any 
subject, and many people thought, when they had 



MR. GOSCHEN 49 

read an article in a Quarterly, that they had done 
enough, and need not read the books themselves at 
all. The articles in the Quarterlies extend to thirty 
or more pages, but thirty pages is now too much. 
So we witness a further condensing process, and we 
have the Fortnightly and the Contemporary, which 
reduce thirty pages to fifteen pages, so that you 
may read a larger number of articles in a shorter 
time and in a shorter form. As if this last con- 
densing process were not enough, the condensed 
articles of these periodicals are further condensed 
by the daily papers, which will give you a summary 
of the summary of all that has been written about 
everything. This appears to me to have a very dele- 
terious effect od serious reading in many ways. In 
the first place, it tends to destroy the taste for it. 
Those who are dipping into so many subjects, and 
gathering information in a summary and superficial 
form, lose the habit of settling down to great works 
which, while they might not give them so much con- 
temporary information, would do much to lift them 
out of their daily lives, and give them access to the 
high and noble thoughts which have been uttered by 
the chief authors of all countries. Ephemeral literature 
is driving out the great classics of the present and the 
past. That is one evil, and another is the inevitable 
hurry. Hurried reading can never be good reading. 
Yet we are all tempted to hurry, in reading as in 
everything else, not only because the pace of life is 
actually greater, but because it has become the fashion 
to hurry. If the Lord Mayor were now to ask all 
those in this hall who were habitually in a hurry, to 
hold up their hands, how many of us — if we were 

E 



50 UNIVERSITY EXTENSION ADDRESSES 

candid — would be in a position to keep our hands 
down ? Why, even young ladies, with plenty of time 
on their hands, gallop through novels as if they had 
as little time as a Cabinet Minister. There must 
always be a few people who are really much engaged ; 
but there is no reason at all why the rest of us should 
hurry, simply to avoid being regarded as out of the 
swim. 

But you may say to me, " You tell us a great deal 
about how not to read, but you do not tell us how to 
read." It would be as reasonable to complain, if I 
had been commenting on unwholesome methods of 
eating, that I did not explain how to eat. The 
answer in both cases is simple, and is the same with 
regard to mental as with regard to bodily nourishment : 
Do not bolt your food. Eead with thought, and 
slowly enough to take in all in your author that is best. 
But, on the other hand, do not be too dainty and merely 
pick a bit here and there. A good, healthy appetite, 
nourished on good, substantial food, leisurely taken — 
that is the way to thrive on books. For, after all, 
what do you read for ? Is it for wisdom ? Then, 
how can you profit by what you do not digest ? Or 
is it for enjoyment ? Even from that point of view, 
I say a perpetual scamper is not the best form of 
amusement. What class has most enjoyment from the 
society of their friends — those who visit few people 
and manage to know them, or those who rush in and 
out upon a great number, just to exchange platitudes ? 
Well, you will best enjoy your books, as your friends, 
by a long tete-a-tete. We are sacrificing real enjoyment 
to hurry in every department of life. This hurry has 
further affected one of the most enjoyable things in 



MR. GOSCHEN 51 

reading — style. Just as with the fast travelling of 
modern days, nobody has time to look closely at the 
more delicate beauties of scenery, so with the fast 
reading of modern days, nobody looks closely enough 
to appreciate the more delicate beauties of expression. 
Some people, it is true, in reaction against the pre- 
vailing tendency, make a specialty of niceties of 
expression ; but the work of these literary aesthetes is, 
again, rather an exaggeration. In the main, style is 
neglected, and, as demand affects supply, and readers 
no longer care about a good style, authors seldom 
produce one. Speaking generally, first-class style is 
being neglected owing to the extraordinary pace at 
which everybody is anxious to read. 

But this habit of haste, which is fatal to sound 
reading, and fatal to style, is no less fatal to thinking — 
the most important of the three intellectual processes 
to which my title refers. As I said, thinking may 
be carried on simultaneously with hearing or reading, 
or, again, as a separate process. Consider it as an 
accompaniment to reading. There are some persons 
who disagree with everything they read. At all 
events, they think, and so far that is to the good. 
A larger number — a much larger number — agree 
with everything they read. If that agreement is 
really an intellectual assent as the result of thinking 
when they are reading, then I have nothing to 
say against it. But the largest class of all probably 
consists of those who read without thinking at all, 
who allow themselves to be carried on, possibly 
remembering a portion of what they read, but not 
really carrying on any intellectual process during the 
operation. And if this is the case when you read, 



52 UNIVERSITY EXTENSION ADDRESSES 

what is the case when you do not read, and when you 
come to original, spontaneous thought ? I am sorry 
to say I think it one of the great faults of the age, 
extending almost to all departments of industry and 
of life, that really sustained and continuous thought 
is going very much out of fashion, and that people 
think less and less. At present how few of us ever 
think for ourselves at all ? It is so much easier and 
pleasanter to drift, and then there are such handy ways 
all round us of getting our opinions ! We have only 
to read the newspapers and we find them ready-made 
for us ! 

We are glad to avail ourselves of these substitutes, 
because thinking is a very difficult process. I mean 
original, constructive thought — the thought which 
creates its own materials — not that which, having 
materials before it, picks holes in them or pieces them 
together. There is negative thinking — criticism, a 
process which many people enjoy very much. That is 
not so difficult. You have your materials before you, 
and you begin to work upon them. But the difficulty 
is to create your materials. It is there that you find 
much mental indolence. Men do not like to set to 
work to think out a difficult problem. That is one of 
the mental operations which more than any other tries 
a man. One of the most difficult forms of thinking is 
to make a plan. Suppose any one is going to read an 
essay, or to make a speech, to deliver an address, or to 
write a sermon. The great difficulty is to construct 
what I may call the backbone of the work. Many 
men will enjoy sitting down to write some beautiful 
passages, — they will enjoy coining some striking 
phrases ; but they dislike to sit down and think 



MR. GOSCHEN 53 

out a plan — to make a backbone. I am sure all the 
clergy and all the public speakers who are present 
here, will admit that, above all, it is essential in every 
speech and in every sermon to have a backbone — a 
line marked out along which you are going. I know of 
some Oxford tutors who will never allow their pupils to 
sit down to write an essay without having beforehand 
settled in their minds what the general outline and 
arrangement are to be. That is the right plan, but it is 
very unlike what most of us do. What is the ordinary 
form of thinking ? We do not choose the line of 
thought ; we drift from point to point ; we allow our- 
selves to be carried down the stream; and then we 
seek to excuse our drifting by a complimentary word, 
— the word " suggestive." " This is a most suggestive 
remark." What does that mean ? Not that you are 
thinking out the problem, but that something is 
suggested to you by something else — that creation 
has to come from association, and not from any form 
of original and spontaneous thought. How many men 
ever sit down to think out a problem ? How many 
men sit down, for instance, to probe to the bottom how 
any of those great social questions which now crowd 
upon us are to be solved ? There, again, we have 
that superfluity and handiness of materials to which 
I have before alluded. Instead of thinking, men rush 
to the newspapers to see what other men have said, or 
open the cupboard where they keep their pamphlets. 
They gather what has been written by others on the 
subject. And, instead of careful thought from stage to 
stage, a man makes his mind a summary of other men's 
thoughts, and his results a digest instead of a creation. 
And why ? It is so extremely difficult to think. 



54 UNIVERSITY EXTENSION ADDRESSES 

Again, there are many who cannot work without 
pen and paper. A leading statesman once told me 
that unless he had pen and paper, he could 
not fairly think out a subject. Why not ? I 
suppose in consequence of want of concentration ; 
the use of pen and paper — mechanical appliances — 
supplied a stronger impulse than any of the living 
intellectual forces in him. This is a strange pheno- 
menon, to my mind not an entirely satisfactory 
phenomenon, although I am hound to say — and I 
say it to my shame — I myself can better think 
out a problem with pen and paper than I can 
without them. Another man, again, will tell you, 
" If I want to think out a subject, I get a friend, — 
I talk to him, and he talks to me, and so we work it 
out between us." But he does not like to work it out 
by himself. Why riot ? Because, if he does, he has to 
do double work — to think of the objections as well as 
the arguments in favour, of the pros as well as the cons. 
So' in his indolence he calls in a friend, who has to 
do the cons while he does the pros — to submit the objec- 
tions to a proposition while he may find arguments in 
its favour. That is not the way in which the great 
thinkers of former days have laboured to produce the 
results which are the heritage of the present generation. 
If we are to hand down to other generations similar 
productions, away with that indolence which is content 
with the reflex action of other men's minds instead 
of the original results of our own ! Some men's minds 
are like flints, from which you cannot get a spark 
unless you strike them one against the other. I 
have cross - examined acquaintances on their powers 
of continuous, satisfactory thought. I have asked — 



MR. GOSCHEN 55 

and it is a good test — Can yon, on a long rail- 
way journey, think ont a problem on a great social 
subject ? Will yon begin to think ont that problem 
when you have before yon two hours in a rail- 
way carriage ? One friend, indeed, told me that if 
he wanted to write some fine passage in a book 
which he was producing, he would get into an 
express train, because its motion helped his thoughts ; 
but he was an exception. Most men have told me 
that they cannot think in these circumstances — I 
am not speaking entirely of ordinary men ; I am 
thinking of intellectual men — and that when they 
have finished their daily or weekly paper, they then 
find themselves reading anything they can lay 
hands on, rather than embark upon any intellectual 
problem at all. This is simply a form of mental 
indolence ; they cannot concentrate themselves and 
bring their thoughts sufficiently together, to do spon- 
taneous work. This again is partly due to their not 
giving themselves time ; thus they lose the habit of 
steady thought, and so are unable to dwell long upon 
one subject. 

I bespeak, therefore, for reading and for thinking 
greater deliberation, more careful choice of material, 
more consecutiveness and continuity, and, above all, no 
haste, no hurrying through anything, whether it be 
lecture, or book, or problem. We of this Society 
hope that we carry into its Centres habits of thorough 
study, of more leisurely study, of study more cal- 
culated than the hasty reading I have described, to 
secure both benefit and amusement. Amusement is 
not to be found in scampering through books, any more 
than in scampering through a country, but you will 



56 UNIVERSITY EXTENSION ADDRESSES 

find more intellectual amusement the more you devote 
yourselves to thorough and continuous exploration. 
We hope that our lecturers and our courses of lectures 
may lead you on in this process. We believe in the 
talents of our lecturers to inspire you with that 
enthusiasm of which I have spoken; and if their 
lectures be suggestive — suggestive in a better sense 
than that to which I alluded — if they are not only 
sign-posts pointing towards the direction in which you 
ought to go, but guides to see you safely started on 
your journey, they will take you to wider fields of 
literature and new worlds of thought. If we succeed 
in producing these results, we shall believe it has not 
been in vain that we have founded this Society, 
members of which you are, and the members of which, 
both present and absent, will, I trust, look to the 
Society as a link which has created for them some 
of the most pleasant associations of their intellectual 
lives. 



THE STUDY OF LITERATURE 
By the Eight Hon. John Morley, M.P. 

1887 

When iny friend Mr. Goschen invited me to discharge 
the duty which has fallen to me this afternoon, I 
confess that I complied with very great misgivings. 
He desired me to say something, if I could, on the 
literary side of education. Now, it is almost im- 
possible — and I think those who know most of 
literature will be readiest to agree with me — to say 
anything new in recommendation of literature in a 
scheme of education. But, as taxpayers know, when 
the Chancellor of the Exchequer levies a contribution, 
he is not a person to be trifled with. I have felt, 
moreover, that Mr. Goschen has worked with such 
extreme zeal and energy for so many years on behalf 
of this good cause, that anybody whom he considered 
able to render him any co-operation owed it to him 
in its fullest extent. The Lord Mayor has been kind 
enough to say that I am especially qualified to speak 
on English literature. I must, however, remind the 
Lord Mayor that I have strayed from literature into 
the region of politics ; and I am not at all sure that 



58 UNIVERSITY EXTENSION ADDRESSES 

such a journey conduces to the soundness of one's 
judgment on literary subjects, or adds much to the 
force of one's arguments on behalf of literary study. 
Politics are a field where action is one long second- 
best, and where the choice constantly lies between 
two blunders. Nothing can be more unlike in aim, 
in ideals, in method, and in matter, than are literature 
and politics. I have, however, determined to do the 
best that I can ; and I feel how great an honour it is 
to be invited to partake in a movement which I do 
not scruple to call one of the most important of all 
those now taking place in English society. 

What is the object of the movement ? What do 
the promoters aim at ? I take it that what they aim 
at is to bring the very best teaching that the country 
can afford, through the hands of the most thoroughly 
competent men, within the reach of every class of the 
community. Their object is to give to the many that 
sound, systematic, and methodical knowledge which 
has hitherto been the privilege of the few who can 
afford the time and money to go to Oxford and Cam- 
bridge ; to diffuse the fertilising waters of intellectual 
knowledge from their great and copious fountain-heads 
at the Universities by a thousand irrigating channels 
over the whole length and breadth of our busy indomi- 
table land. Gentlemen, this is a most important point. 
Goethe said that nothing is more frightful than a 
teacher who only knows what his scholars are intended 
to know. We may depend upon it that the man who 
knows his own subject most thoroughly is most likely 
to excite interest about it in the minds of other people. 
We hear, perhaps more often than we like, that we 
live in a democratic age. It is true enough, and I 



MR. JOHN MORLEY 59 

can conceive nothing more democratic than such a 
movement as this, nothing which is more calculated 
to remedy defects that are incident to democracy, more 
thoroughly calculated to raise democracy to heights 
which other forms of government and older orderings 
of society have never yet attained. No movement 
can be more wisely democratic than one which seeks 
to give to the northern miner or the London artisan 
knowledge as good and as accurate, though he may 
not have so much of it, as if he were a student at 
Oxford or Cambridge. Something of the same kind 
may be said of the new frequency with which scholars 
of great eminence and consummate accomplishments, 
like Jowett, Lang, Myers, Leaf, and others, bring all 
their scholarship to bear, in order to provide for those 
who are not able, or do not care, to read old classics 
in the originals, brilliant and faithful renderings of 
them in our own tongue. Nothing but good, I am 
persuaded, can come of all these attempts to connect 
learning with the living forces of society, and to make 
industrial England a sharer in the classic tradition of 
the lettered world. 

I am well aware that there is an apprehension that 
the present extraordinary zeal for education in all its 
forms — elementary, secondary, and higher — may bear 
in its train some evils of its own. It is said that 
nobody in England is now content to practise a handi- 
craft, and that every one seeks to be at least a clerk. 
It is said that the moment is even already at hand 
when a great deal of practical distress does and must 
result from this tendency. I remember years ago 
that in the United States I heard something of the 
same kind. All I can say is that this tendency, if it 



60 UNIVERSITY EXTENSION ADDRESSES 

exists, is sure to right itself. In no case can the 
spread of so mischievous a notion as that knowledge 
and learning ought not to come within reach of handi- 
craftsmen be attributed to literature. There is a 
famous passage in which Pericles, the great Athenian, 
describing the glory of the community of which he was 
so far-shining a member, says, "We at Athens are 
lovers of the beautiful, yet simple in our tastes ; we 
cultivate the mind without loss of manliness." But 
then remember that after all Athenian society rested 
on a basis of slavery. Athenian citizens were able to 
pursue their love of the beautiful, and their simplicity, 
and to cultivate their minds without loss of manliness, 
because the drudgery and hard work and rude service 
of society were performed by those who had no share 
in all these good things. With us, happily, it is very 
different. We are all more or less upon a level. Our 
object is — and it is that which in my opinion raises 
us infinitely above the Athenian level — to bring the 
Periclean ideas of beauty and simplicity and cultivation 
of the mind within the reach of those who do the 
drudgery and the service and rude work of the world. 
And it can be done — do not let us be afraid — it can 
be done without in the least degree impairing the skill 
of our handicraftsmen or the manliness of our national 
life. It can be done without blunting or numbing 
the practical energies of our people. 

I know they say that if you meddle with literature 
you are less qualified to take your part in practical 
affairs. You run a risk of being libelled a dreamer 
and a theorist. But, after all, if we take the very 
highest form of all practical energy — the governing of 
the country — all this talk is ludicrously untrue. I 



MR. JOHN MORLEY 61 

venture to say that in the present Government, from 
the Prime Minister downwards, there are three men 
at least who are perfectly capable of earning their bread 
as men of letters. In the late G-overnment, besides 
the Prime Minister, there were also three men of 
letters, and I have never heard that those three were 
greater simpletons than their neighbours. There is a 
Commission now at work on a very important and 
abstruse subject. I am told that no one there dis- 
plays so acute an intelligence of the difficulties that 
are to be met, and the important arguments that are 
brought forward, and the practical ends to be achieved, 
as the Chairman of the Commission, who is not what 
is called a practical man, but a man of study, litera- 
ture, theoretical speculation, and University training. 
Oh no, gentlemen, some of the best men of business in 
the country are men who have had the best collegian's 
equipment, and are the most accomplished bookmen. 

It is true that we cannot bring to London with 
this movement the indefinable charm that haunts 
the gray and venerable quadrangles of Oxford and 
Cambridge. We cannot take you into the stately halls, 
the silent and venerable libraries, the solemn chapels, 
the studious old-world gardens. We cannot surround 
you with all those elevated memorials and sanctifying 
associations of scholars and poets, of saints and sages, 
that march in glorious procession through the ages, 
and make of Oxford and Cambridge a dream of music 
for the inward ear, and of delight for the contemplative 
eye. We cannot bring all that to you ; but I hope, 
and I believe, it is the object of those who are more 
intimately connected with the Society than I have 
been, that every partaker of the benefits of this Society 



62 UNIVEKS1TY EXTENSION ADDRESSES 

will feel himself and herself in living connection with 
those two famous centres, and feel conscious of the 
links that bind the modern to the older England. 
One of the most interesting facts mentioned in your 
Eeport this year — and I am particularly interested in 
it for personal reasons — is that last winter four prizes 
of £10 each were offered in the Northumberland 
mining district, one each to the male and female 
student in every Term who should take the highest 
place in the examination, in order to enable them to 
spend a month in Cambridge in the Long Vacation for 
the purpose of carrying on in the laboratories and 
museums the work in which they had been engaged 
in the winter at the local centre. That is not a step 
taken by our Society ; but Cambridge University has 
inspired and worked out the scheme, and I am not 
without hope that from London some of those who 
attend these classes may be able to go and have a 
taste of what Oxford and Cambridge are like. I like 
to think how poor scholars three or four hundred 
years ago used to flock to Oxford, regardless of cold, 
privation, and hardship, so that they might satisfy 
their hunger and thirst for knowledge. I like to 
think of them in connection with this movement. I 
like to think of them in connection with students like 
those miners in Northumberland, whom I know well, 
and who are mentioned in the Eeport of the Cambridge 
Extension Syndicate as, after a day's hard work in the 
pit, walking four or five miles through cold and dark- 
ness and rough roads to hear a lecture, and then 
walking back asrain the same four or five miles. You 
must look for the same enthusiasm, the same hunger 
and thirst for knowledge, that presided over the 



MR, JOHN MORLEY 63 

foundation of the Universities many centuries ago, 
to cany on this work, to strengthen and stimulate 
men's faith in knowledge, their hopes from it, and 
their zeal for it. 

The progress of the Society has been most re- 
markable. In 1876 there were, I find, five centres 
and seven courses. This year there are thirty-one 
centres and sixty courses. But to get a survey of 
this movement, you must look not only at London, 
but at Oxford and Cambridge. You find there that 
Oxford has twenty -two centres and twenty -nine 
courses, and Cambridge has fifty centres and eighty 
courses. I say that the thought of all this activity, 
and all the good of every kind, social, moral, and 
intellectual, which is being done by means of it, is in 
the highest degree encouraging, and not only en- 
couraging, but calculated to inspire in every man who 
has ever felt the love and thirst for knowledge the 
deepest interest in the movement and the warmest 
wishes for its further success. 

Speaking now of the particular kind of knowledge 
of which I am going to say a few words — how does 
literature fare in these important operations ? Last 
term out of fifty -seven courses in the Cambridge 
scheme there were ten on literature ; out of thirty-one 
of our courses, seven were on literature. Well, I am 
bound to say I think that that position for literature 
in the scheme is very reasonably satisfactory. I have 
made some inquiries, since I knew that I was going 
to speak here, in the great popular centres of industry 
in the North and in Scotland as to the popularity of 
literature as a subject of teaching. I find very much 
what I should have expected. The professors all tell 



64 UNIVERSITY EXTENSION ADDRESSES 

very much the same story. This is, that it is ex- 
tremely hard to interest any considerable number of 
people in subjects that seem to have no direct bearing 
upon the practical work of everyday life. There is a 
disinclination to study literature for its own sake, or 
to study anything which does not seem to have a 
visible and direct influence upon the daily work of 
life. The nearest approach to a taste for literature is 
a certain demand for instruction in history with a 
little flavour of contemporary politics. In short, the 
demand for instruction in literature is strictly moderate. 
That is what men of experience tell me, and we have 
to recognise it. I cannot profess to be very much 
surprised. Mr. Goschen, when he spoke — I think in 
Manchester — some years ago, said there were three 
motives which might induce people to seek the higher 
education. First, to obtain greater knowledge for 
bread-winning purposes. From that point of view 
science would be most likely to feed the classes. 
Secondly, the improvement of one's knowledge of 
political economy, and history, and facts bearing upon 
the actual political work and life of the day. Thirdly, 
— and I am quite content to take Mr. Goschen 's 
enumeration — was the desire of knowledge as a luxury 
to brighten life and kindle thought. I am very much 
afraid that, in the ordinary temper of our people, and 
the ordinary mode of looking at life, the last of these 
motives savours a little of self-indulgence, and senti- 
mentality, and other objectionable qualities. There is 
a great stir in the region of physical science at this 
moment, and it is, in my judgment, likely to take a 
chief and foremost place in the field of intellectual 
activity. After the severity with which science was 



MR. JOHN MORLEY 65 

for so many ages treated by literature, I cannot 
wonder that science now retaliates, now mightily exalts 
herself, and thrusts literature down into the lower 
place. I only have to say on the relative claims of 
science and literature what the great Dr. Arnold said: 
" If one might wish for impossibilities, I might then 
wish that my children might be well versed in physical 
science, but in due subordination to the fulness and 
freshness of their knowledge on moral subjects. This, 
however, I believe cannot be ; wherefore, rather 
than have it the principal thing in my son's mind, 
I would gladly have him think that the sun went 
round the earth, and that the stars were so many 
spangles set in the bright blue firmament." * I am 
glad to think that one may know something of these 
matters, and yet not believe that the sun goes round 
the earth. But of the two, I for one am not pre- 
pared to accept the rather enormous pretensions that 
are nowadays sometimes made for physical science 
as the be-all and end-all of education. 

Next to this we know that there is a great stir on 
behalf of technical and commercial education. The 
special needs of our time and country compel us to 
pay a particular attention to this subject. Here 
knowledge is business, and we shall never hold our in- 
dustrial pre-eminence, with all that hangs upon that pre- 
eminence, unless we push on technical and commercial 
education with all our might. But there is — and now 
I come nearer my subject — a third kind of knowledge 
which, too, in its own way is business. There is the 
cultivation of the sympathies and imagination, the 
quickening of the moral sensibilities, and the enlarge- 

1 Stanley's Life of Arnold, ii. 31. 
F 



66 UNIVERSITY EXTENSION ADDRESSES 

ment of the moral vision. The great need in modern 
culture, which is scientific in method, rationalistic in 
spirit, and utilitarian in purpose, is to find some 
effective agency for cherishing within us the ideal. 
That is, I take it, the business and function of litera- 
ture. Literature alone will not make a good citizen ; 
it will not make a good man. History affords too 
many proofs that scholarship and learning by no 
means purge men of acrimony, of vanity, of arrogance, 
of a murderous tenacity about trifles. Mere scholar- 
ship and learning and the knowledge of books do not 
by any means arrest and dissolve all the travelling 
acids of the human system. Nor would I pretend for 
a moment that literature can be any substitute for life 
and action. Burke said, " What is the education of 
the generality of the world ? Eeading a parcel of 
books ? No ! Eestraint and discipline, examples of 
virtue and of justice, these are what form the educa- 
tion of the world." That is profoundly true ; it is life 
that is the great educator. But the parcel of books, 
if they are well chosen, reconcile us to this discipline ; 
they interpret this virtue and justice ; they awaken 
within us the diviner mind, and rouse us to a con- 
sciousness of what is best in others and ourselves. 

As a matter of rude fact, there is much to make us 
question whether the spread of literature, as now 
understood, does awaken the diviner mind. The 
figures of the books that are taken out from public 
libraries are not all that we could wish. I am not 
going to inflict many figures on you, but there is one 
set of figures that distresses book-lovers, I mean the 
enormous place that fiction occupies in the books taken 
out. In one great town in the North prose fiction 



MR. JOHN MORLEY 67 

forms 76 per cent of all the books lent. In another 
great town prose fiction is 82 per cent; in a third 84 
per cent ; and in a fourth 6 7 per cent. I had the 
curiosity to see what happens in the libraries of the 
United States ; and there — supposing the system of 
cataloguing and enumeration to be the same — they 
are a trifle more serious in their taste than we are ; 
where our average is about 70 per cent, at a place 
like Chicago it is only about 60 per cent. In Scot- 
land, too, it ought to be said that they have what I 
call a better average in respect to prose fiction. There 
is a larger demand for books called serious than in 
England. And I suspect, though I do not know, that 
one reason why there is in Scotland a greater demand 
for the more serious classes of literature than fiction, is 
that in the Scotch Universities there are what we have 
not in England — well-attended Chairs of Literature, 
systematically and methodically studied. Do not let 
it be supposed that I at all underrate the value of 
fiction. On the contrary, I think when a man has 
done a hard day's work, he can do nothing better than 
fall to and read the novels of Walter Scott or Miss 
Austen, or some of our living writers. I am rather a 
voracious reader of fiction myself. I do not, therefore, 
point to it as a reproach or as a source of discourage- 
ment, that fiction takes so large a place in the objects 
of literary interest. I only insist that it is much too 
large, and we should be better pleased if it sank to 
about 40 per cent, and what is classified as general 
literature rose from 13 to 25 per cent. 

There are other complaints of literature as an 
object of interest in this country. I was reading the 
other day an essay by the late head of my old 



68 UNIVERSITY EXTENSION ADDRESSES 

College at Oxford — a very learned and remarkable 
man — Mark Pattison, who was a book-lover if ever 
there was one. Now, he complained that the book- 
seller's bill in the ordinary English middle class family 
is shamefully small. He thought it monstrous that a 
man who is earning £1000 a year should spend less 
than £1 a week upon books — that is to say, less than 
a shilling in the pound per annum. Well, I know 
that Chancellors of the Exchequer take from us 8d. or 
6d. in the pound, and I am not sure that they always 
use it as wisely as if they left us to spend it on books. 
Still, a shilling in the pound to be spent on books by 
a clerk who earns a couple of hundred pounds a year, 
or by a workman who earns a quarter of that sum, is 
rather more, I think, than can be reasonably expected. 
I do not believe for my part that a man really needs 
to have a very great many books. Pattison said that 
nobody who respected himself could have less than 1000 
volumes. He pointed out that you can stack 1000 
octavo volumes in a bookcase that shall be 13 ft. by 
1 ft., and 6 inches deep, and that everybody has that 
space at disposal. Still the point is not that men 
should have a great many books, but that they should 
have the right ones, and that they should use those 
that they have. We may all agree in lamenting that 
there are so many houses — even some of considerable 
social pretension — where you will not find a good 
atlas, a good dictionary, or a good cyclopaedia of 
reference. What is still more lamentable, in a good 
many more houses where these books are, they are 
never referred to or opened. That is a very discredit- 
able fact, because I defy anybody to take up a copy 
of the Times newspaper — and I speak in the presence 



MR. JOHN MORLEY 69 

of gentlemen well up in all that is going on in the 
world — and not come upon something in it upon which, 
if their interest in the affairs of the day were active, 
intelligent, and alert, as it ought to be, they would 
consult an atlas, dictionary, or cyclopaedia of reference. 
I do not think for a single moment that everybody 
is born with the ability for using books, for reading 
and studying literature. Certainly not everybody is 
born with the capacity of being a great scholar. All 
people are no more born great scholars like Gibbon 
and Bentley, than they are all born great musicians like 
Handel and Beethoven. What is much worse than 
that, many are born with the incapacity of reading, 
just as they are born with the incapacity of distin- 
guishing one tune from another. To them I have 
nothing to say. Even the morning paper is too much 
for them. They can only skim the surface even of 
that. I go further, and I frankly admit that the habit 
and power of reading with reflection, comprehension, 
and memory all alert and awake, does not come at 
once to the natural man any more than many other 
sovereign virtues come to that interesting creature. 
What I do submit to you and press upon you with 
great earnestness is, that it requires no preterhuman 
force of will in any young man or woman — unless 
household circumstances are unusually vexatious and 
unfavourable — to get at least half an hour out of a 
solid busy day for good and disinterested reading. 
Some will say that this is too much to expect, and the 
first persons to say it, I venture to predict, will be 
those who waste their time most. At any rate, if I 
cannot get half an hour, I will be content with a 
quarter. Now, in half an hour I fancy you can read 



70 UNIVERSITY EXTENSION ADDRESSES 

fifteen or twenty pages of Burke ; or yon can read one 
of Wordsworth's masterpieces — say the lines on Tin tern; 
or say, one-third — if a scholar, in the original, and if 
not, in a translation — of a book of the Iliad or the iEneid. 
I am not filling the half hour too full. But try for 
yourselves what you can read in half an hour. Then 
multiply the half hour by 365, and consider what 
treasures you might have laid by at the end of the 
year ; and what happiness, fortitude, and wisdom they 
would have given you for a lifetime. 

I will not take up your time by explaining the 
various mechanical contrivances and aids to successful 
study. They are not to be despised by those who 
would extract the most from books. Many people 
think of knowledge as of money. They would like 
knowledge, but cannot face the perseverance and 
self-denial that go to the acquisition of it, as they go 
to the acquisition of money. The wise student will do 
most of his reading with a pen or a pencil in his hand. 
He will not shrink from the useful toil of making 
abstracts and summaries of what he is reading. Sir 
William Hamilton was a strong advocate for under- 
scoring books of study. " Intelligent underlining," he 
said, " gave a kind of abstract of an important work, 
and by* the use of different coloured inks to mark a 
difference of contents, and discriminate the doctrinal 
from the historical or illustrative elements of an argu- 
ment or exposition, the abstract became an analysis 
very serviceable for ready reference." 1 This assumes, 
as Hamilton said, that the book to be operated on is 
your own, and perhaps is rather too elaborate a counsel of 
perfection for most of us. Again, some great men — 

1 Yeitch's Life of Hamilton, 314, 392. 



MR. JOHN MORLEY 71 

Gibbon was one, and Daniel Webster was another, and 
the great Lord Strafford was a third — always before 
reading a book made a short, rough analysis of the 
questions which they expected to be answered in it, 
the additions to be made to their knowledge, and 
whither it would take them. 1 I have sometimes tried 
that way of steadying and guiding attention; I have 
never done so without advantage ; and I commend it to 
you. I need not tell you that you will find that most 
books worth reading once are worth reading twice, and — 
what is most important of all — the masterpieces of 
literature are worth reading a thousand times. It is 
a great mistake to think that because you have read a 
masterpiece once or twice, or ten times, therefore you 
have done with it. Because it is a masterpiece, you 
ought to live with it, and make it part of your daily 
life. Another practice which I commend to you is that 
of keeping a common-place book, and transcribing into 
it what is striking and interesting and suggestive. 
And if you keep it wisely, as Locke has taught us, you 
will put every entry under a head, division, or sub- 
division. 2 This is an excellent practice for concen- 

1 "After glancing ray eye," says Gibbon, "over the design and 
order of a new book, I suspended the perusal until I had finished the 
task of self-examination ; till I had resolved in a solitary walk all that 
I knew or believed or had thought on the subject of the whole work 
or of some particular chapter : I Avas then qualified to discern how 
much the author added to my original stock ; and if I was sometimes 
satisfied by the agreement, I was sometimes armed by the opposition 
of our ideas" (Dr. Smith's Gibbon, i. 64). 

2 " If I would put anything in my Common-place Book, I find 
out a head to which I may refer it. Each head ought to be some 
important and essential word to the matter in hand " (Locke's Works, 
iii. 308, ed. 1801). This is for indexing purposes, but it is worth 
while to go further and make a title for the passage extracted, indicat- 
ing its pith and purport. 



72 UNIVERSITY EXTENSION ADDRESSES 

trating your thought on the passage and making you 
alive to its real point and significance. 

Various correspondents have asked me to say 
something about those lists of a hundred books that 
have been circulating through the world within the 
last few months. I have examined some of these lists 
with considerable care, and whatever else may be said 
of them — and I speak of them with great deference 
and reserve, because men for whom I have a great 
regard have compiled them — they do not seem to me 
to be calculated either to create or satisfy a wise taste 
for literature in any very worthy sense. To fill a man 
with a hundred parcels of heterogeneous scraps from 
the Ifahabharata, and the Slicking, down to Pickwick 
and White's Selborne, may pass the time, but I don't 
think it would strengthen or instruct or delight. For 
instance, it is a mistake to think that every book that 
has a great name in the history of books or of thought 
is worth reading. Some of the most famous books are 
least worth reading. Their fame was due to their 
doing something that needed in their day to be done. 
The work done, the virtue of the book expires. Again, 
I agree with those who say that the steady working- 
down one of these lists would end in the manufacture 
of that obnoxious product — the prig. A prig has been 
defined as an animal that is overfed for its size. I 
think that these bewildering miscellanies would lead 
to an immense quantity of that kind of overfeeding. 
The object of reading is not to dip into everything 
that even wise men have ever written. In the words 
of one of the most winning writers of English that 
ever existed — Cardinal Newman — the object of litera- 
ture in education is to open the mind, to correct it, to 



MR. JOHN MOELEY 73 

refine it, to enable it to comprehend and digest its 
knowledge, to give it power over its own faculties, 
application, flexibility, method, critical exactness, 
sagacity, address, and expression. These are the 
objects of that intellectual perfection which a literary 
education is destined to give. I will not venture on 
a list of a hundred books, but will recommend you to 
one book well worthy of your attention. Those who 
are curious as to what they should read in the region 
of pure literature will do well to peruse my friend 
Mr. Frederic Harrison's volume, called The Choice of 
Books. You will find there as much wise thought, 
eloquently and brilliantly put, as in any volume of its 
size and on its subject, whether it be in the list of a 
hundred or not. 

Let me pass to another topic. We are often asked 
whether it is best to study subjects, or authors, or 
books. Well, I think that is like most of the stock 
questions with which the perverse ingenuity of man- 
kind torments itself. There is no universal and 
exclusive answer. It is idle. My own answer is a very 
plain one, and it is this. It is sometimes best to 
study books, sometimes authors, and sometimes sub- 
jects ; but at all times it is best to study authors, 
subjects, and books in connection with one another. 
Whether you make your first approach from interest 
in an author or in a book, the fruit will be only half 
gathered if you leave off without new ideas and clearer 
lights both on the man and the matter. One of the 
noblest masterpieces in the literature of civil and 
political wisdom is to be found in Burke's three perform- 
ances on the American War — his speech on Taxation 
in 1774, on Conciliation in 1775, and his letter to the 



74 UNIVERSITY EXTENSION ADDRESS ES 

Sheriffs of Bristol in 1777. I can only repeat to yon 
what I have been saying in print and out of it for a 
good many years, and what I believe more firmly as 
observation is enlarged by time and occasion, that 
these three pieces are the most perfect manual in all 
literature for the study of great affairs, whether for 
the purpose of knowledge or action. " They are an 
example," as I have said before now, " an example 
without fault of all the qualities which the critic, 
whether a theorist or an actor, of great political 
situations should strive by night and by day to possess. 
If their subject were as remote as the quarrel between 
the Corinthians and Corcyra, or the war between 
Rome and the Allies, instead of a conflict to which 
the world owes the opportunity of the most important 
of political experiments, we should still have every- 
thing to learn from the author's treatment ; the vigorous 
grasp of masses of compressed detail, the wide illumina- 
tion from great principles of human experience, the 
strong and masculine feeling for the two great political 
ends of justice and freedom, the large and generous 
interpretation of expediency, the morality, the vision, 
the noble temper." No student worthy of the name 
will lay aside these pieces, so admirable in their 
literary expression, so important for history, so rich in 
the lessons of civil wisdom, until he has found out 
something from other sources as to the circumstances 
from which such writings arose, and as to the man 
whose resplendent genius inspired them. There are 
great personalities like Bnrke who march through 
history with voices like a clarion trumpet and some- 
thing like the glitter of swords in their hands. They 
are as interesting as their work. Contact with them 



MR. JOHN MORLEY 75 

warms and kindles the mind. You will not be 
content, after reading one of these pieces, without 
knowing the character and personality of the man 
who conceived it, and until you have spent an hour 
or two — and an hour or two will go a long way with 
Burke still fresh in your mind — over other composi- 
tions in political literature, over Bacon's civil pieces, 
or Machiavelli's Prince, and others in the same order 
of thought. That is my auswer to the question 
whether you should study books, subjects, or authors. 

This points to the right answer to another question 
that is constantly asked. We are constantly asked 
whether desultory reading is among things lawful and 
permitted. May we browse at large in a library, as 
Johnson said, or is it forbidden to open a book without 
a definite aim and fixed expectations ? I am for a 
compromise. If a man has once got his general point 
of view, if he has striven with success to place himself 
at the centre, what follows is of less consequence. If 
he has got in his head a good map of the country, he 
may ramble at large with impunity. If he has once 
well and truly laid the foundations of a methodical, 
systematic habit of mind, what he reads will find its 
way to its proper place. If his intellect is in good 
order, he will find in every quarter something to 
assimilate and something that will nourish. 

Now I am going to deal with another question, 
with which perhaps I ought to have started. What 
is literature ? It has often been defined. Emerson 
says it is a record of the best thoughts. " By litera- 
ture," says another author, I think Mr. Stopford 
Brooke, " we mean the written thoughts and feelings 
of intelligent men and women arranged in a way that 



76 UNIVERSITY EXTENSION ADDRESSES 

shall give pleasure to the reader.'' A third account is 
that " the aim of a student of literature is to know the 
best that has been thought in the world." Definitions 
always appear to me in these things to be in the 
nature of vanity. I feel that the attempt to be com- 
pact in the definition of literature ends in something 
that is rather meagre, partial, starved, and unsatis- 
factory. I turn to the answer given by a great French 
writer to a question not quite the same, viz. " What is 
a classic ? " Literature consists of a whole body of 
classics in the true sense of the word, and a classic, as 
Sainte Beuve defines him, is an "author who has 
enriched the human mind, who has really added to its 
treasure, who has got it to take a step farther ; who 
has discovered some unequivocal moral truth, or pene- 
trated to some eternal passion, in that heart of man 
where it seemed as thouoh all were known and 
explored ; who has produced his thought, or his 
observation, or his invention under some form, no 
matter what, so it be great, large, acute, and reason- 
able, sane and beautiful in itself ; who has spoken to 
all in a style of his own, yet a style which finds itself 
the style of everybody, — in a style that is at once 
new and antique, and is the contemporary of all the 
ages." At a single hearing you may not take all that 
in ; but if you should have any opportunity of recurring 
to it you will find this a satisfactory, full, and instruc- 
tive account of what is a classic, and will find in it a 
full and satisfactory account of what those who have 
thought most on literature hope to get from it, and 
most would desire to confer upon others by it. 
Literature consists of all the books — and they are 
not so many — where moral truth and human passion 



MR. JOHN MORLEY 77 

are touched with a certain largeness, sanity, and 
attraction of form. My notion of the literary student 
is one who through books explores the strange voyages 
of man's moral reason, the impulses of the human 
heart, the chances and changes that have overtaken 
human ideals of virtue and happiness, of conduct and 
manners, and the shifting fortunes of great conceptions 
of truth and virtue. Poets, dramatists, humorists, 
satirists, masters of fiction, the great preachers, the 
character-writers, the maxim-writers, the great political 
orators — they are all literature in so far as they teach 
us to know man and to know human nature. This 
is what makes literature, rightly sifted and selected 
and rightly studied, not the mere elegant trifling that 
it is so often and so erroneously supposed to be, but a 
proper instrument for a systematic training of the 
imagination and sympathies, and of a genial and varied 
moral sensibility. 

From this point of view let me remind you that 
books are not the products of accident and caprice. 
As Goethe said, if you would understand an author, 
you must understand his age. The same thing is just 
as true of a book. If you would comprehend it, you 
must know the age. There is an order ; there are 
causes and relations. There are relations between 
great compositions and the societies from which they 
have emerged. I would put it in this way to you, 
that just as the naturalist strives to understand and 
to explain the distribution of plants and animals over 
the surface of the globe, to connect their presence or 
their absence with the great geological, climatic, and 
oceanic changes, so the student of literature, if he be 
wise, undertakes an ordered and connected survey 



78 UNIVERSITY EXTENSION ADDRESSES 

of ideas, of tastes, of sentiments, of imagination, of 
humour, of invention, as they affect and as they are 
affected by the ever-changing experiences of human 
nature, and the manifold variations that time and 
circumstances are incessantly working in human 
society. 

It is because I am possessed, and desire to see 
others possessed, by that conception of literary study, 
that I watch with the greatest sympathy and admira- 
tion the efforts of those who are striving so hard, and, 
I hope, so successfully, to bring the systematic and 
methodical study of our own literature, in connection 
with other literatures, among subjects for teaching and 
examination in the Universities of Oxford and Cam- 
bridge. I regard those efforts with the liveliest 
interest and sympathy. Everybody agrees that an 
educated man ought to have a general notion of the 
course of the great outward events of European history. 
So, too, an educated man ought to have a general 
notion of the course of all those inward thoughts and 
moods which find their expression in literature. I 
think that in cultivating the study of literature, as I 
have rather laboriously endeavoured to define it, you 
will be cultivating the most important side of history. 
Knowledge of it gives stability and substance to 
character. It furnishes a view of the ground we stand 
on. It builds up a solid backing of precedent and 
experience. It teaches us where we are. It protects 
us against imposture and surprise. 

Before closing I should like to say one word upon 
the practice of composition. I have suffered, by the 
chance of life, very much from the practice of com- 
position. It has been my lot, I suppose, to read 



MR. JOHN MORLEY 79 

more unpublished work than any one else in this 
room, and, I hope, in this city. There is an idea, 
and I venture to think, a very mistaken idea, 
that you cannot have a taste for literature unless 
you are yourself an author. I make bold entirely to 
demur to that proposition. It is practically most 
mischievous, and leads scores and even hundreds of 
people to waste their time in the most unprofitable 
manner that the wit of man can devise, on work in 
which they can no more achieve even the most 
moderate excellence than they can compose a Ninth 
Symphony or paint a Transfiguration. It is a terrible 
error to suppose that because you relish " Wordsworth's 
solemn -thoughted idyll, or Tennyson's enchanted 
reverie," therefore you have a call to run off to write 
bad verse at the Lakes or the Isle of Wight. I 
beseech you not all to turn to authorship. I will go 
further. I venture, with all respect to those who are 
teachers of literature, to doubt the excellence and 
utility of the practice of over-much essay -writing and 
composition. I have very little faith in rules of style, 
though I have an unbounded faith in the virtue of 
eultivatiDg direct and precise expression. But you 
must carry on the operation inside the mind, and not 
merely by practising literary deportment on paper. 
It is not everybody who can command the mighty 
rhythm of the greatest masters of human speech. But 
every one can make reasonably sure that he knows 
what he means, and whether he has found the right 
word. These are internal operations, and are not 
forwarded by writing for writing's sake. I am strong 
for attention to expression, if that attention be exer- 
cised in the right^way. It has been said a million 



80 UNIVERSITY EXTENSION ADDRESSES 

times that the foundation of right expression in speech 
or writing is sincerity. It is as true now as it has 
ever been. Eight expression is a part of character. As 
somebody has said, by learning to speak with precision, 
you learn to think with correctness ; and the way to 
firm and vigorous speech lies through the cultivation 
of high and noble sentiments. I think, as far as my 
observation has gone, that men will do better if 
they seek precision by studying carefully and with an 
open mind and a vigilant eye the great models of 
writing, than by excessive practice of writing on their 
own account. 

Much might here be said on what is one of the most 
important of all the sides of literary study. I mean 
its effect as helping to preserve the dignity and the 
purity of the English language. That noble instru- 
ment has never been exposed to such dangers as those 
which beset it to-day. Domestic slang, scientific 
slang, pseudo-aesthetic affectations, hideous importations 
from American newspapers, all bear down with horrible 
force upon the glorious fabric which the genius of our 
race has reared. I will say nothing of my own on 
this pressing theme, but will read to you a passage of 
weight and authority from the greatest master of 
mighty and beautiful speech. 

" Whoever in a state," said Milton, " knows how wisely to 
form the manners of men and to rule them at home and in war 
with excellent institutes, him in the first place, above others, I 
should esteem worthy of all honour. But next to him the man 
who strives to establish in maxims and rules the method and habit 
of speaking and writing received from a good age of the nation, 
and, as it were, to fortify the same round with a kind of wall, 
the daring to overleap which let a law only short of that of 
Romulus be used to prevent. . . . The one, as I believe, 



MR. JOHN MOKLEY 81 

supplies noble courage and intrepid counsels against an enemy 
invading the territory. The other takes to himself the task of 
extirpating and defeating, by means of a learned detective 
police of ears, and a light band of good authors, that barbarism 
which makes large inroads upon the minds of men, and is a 
destructive intestine enemy of genius. Nor is it to be con- 
sidered of small consequence what language, pure or corrupt, a 
people has, or what is their customary degree of propriety in 
speaking it. . . . For, let the words of a country be in part 
unhandsome and offensive in themselves, in part debased by 
wear and wrongly uttered, and what do they declare, but, by 
no light indication, that the inhabitants of that country are an 
indolent, idly-yawning race, with minds already long prepared 
for any amount of servility? On the other hand, we have 
never heard that any empire, any state, did not at least flourish 
in a middling degree as long as its own liking and care for its 
language lasted." 1 

The probabilities are that we are now coming to 
an epoch, as it seems to me, of a quieter style. There 
have been in our generation three great giants of prose 
writing. There was, first of all, Carlyle, there was 
Macaulay, and there is Mr. Buskin. These are all 
giants, and they have the rights of giants. But I do 
not believe that a greater misfortune can befall the 
students who attend classes here, than that they should 
strive to write like any one of these three illustrious 
men. I think it is the worst thing that can happen 
to them. They can never attain to it. It is not 
everybody who can bend the bow of Ulysses, and 
most men only do themselves a mischief by trying to 
bend it. We are now on our way to a quieter style. 
I am not sorry for it. Truth is quiet. Milton's 
phrase ever lingers in our minds as one of imperishable 
beauty — where he regrets that he is drawn by I 

1 Letter to Bonraattei, from Florence, 1638. 
G 



82 UNIVERSITY EXTENSION ADDRESSES 

know not what, from beholding the bright countenance 
of truth in the quiet and still air of delightful studies. 
Moderation and judgment are more than the flash and 
the glitter even of the greatest genius. I hope that 
your professors of rhetoric will teach you to cultivate 
that golden art — the steadfast use of a language in 
which truth can be told ; a speech that is strong by 
natural force, and not merely effective by declamation ; 
an utterance without trick, without affectation, without 
mannerisms, and without any of that excessive ambi- 
tion which overleaps itself as much in prose writing as 
it does in other things. 

Now, ladies and gentlemen, I will detain you no 
longer. I hope that I have made it clear that we 
conceive the end of education on its literary side to 
be to make a man and not a cyclopaedia, to make a 
citizen and not a book of elegant extracts. Literature 
does not end with knowledge of forms, with in- 
ventories of books and authors, with finding the key 
of rhythm, with the varying measure of the stanza, 
or the changes from the involved and sonorous periods 
of the seventeenth century down to the staccato of the 
nineteenth century, or all the rest of the technicalities 
of scholarship. Do not think I contemn these. They 
are all good things to know, but they are not ends in 
themselves. The intelligent man, says Plato, will 
prize those studies which result in his soul getting 
soberness, righteousness, and wisdom, and he will less 
value the others. Literature is one of the instruments, 
and one of the most powerful instruments, for forming 
character, for giving us men and women armed with 
reason, braced by knowledge, clothed with steadfast- 
ness and courage, and inspired by that public spirit 



MR. JOHN MORLEY 83 

and public virtue of which it has been well said that 
they are the brightest ornaments of the mind of man. 
Bacon is right, as he generally is, when he bids us 
read not to contradict and refute, nor to believe and 
take for granted, nor to find talk and discourse, but to 
weigh and to consider. Yes, let us read to weigh and 
to consider. In the times before us that promise or 
threaten deep political, economical, and social con- 
troversy, what we need to do is to induce our people 
to weigh and consider. We want them to cultivate 
energy without impatience, activity without restless- 
ness, inflexibility without ill -humour. I am not 
going to preach to you any artificial stoicism. I am 
not going to preach to you any indifference to money, 
or to the pleasures of social intercourse, or to the 
esteem and good-will of our neighbours, or to any 
other of the consolations and the necessities of life. 
But, after all, the thing that matters most, both for 
happiness and for duty, is that we should habitually 
live with wi^ thoughts and right feelings. Literature 
helps us more than other studies to this most blessed 
companionship of wise thoughts and right feelings, 
and so I have taken this opportunity of earnestly 
commending it to your interest and care. 



SCIENTIFIC STUDY 

By Sir James Paget, Bart., F.RS. 

1888 

The subject of scientific study in its full range would 
be far beyond my power and your patience. I shall 
believe, therefore, that I may speak of only some parts 
of the study, and of these only as they may be pur- 
sued within the range and in the manner designed by 
this Society, and as they may be followed by the 
majority of those who attend the lectures and the 
classes. Moreover, I can have no choice but to select 
my illustrations from the parts of scientific study with 
which I have myself been occupied. In comparison 
with the whole field, these parts are very small, but 
they may serve well for supplying examples of what 
I chiefly wish to speak of, namely, the utility of 
scientific study for the education of some portions of 
the mind; its utility, not only for the teaching of 
truth, but for the teaching of the methods by which 
truth has been attained. = 

I should like, first, to meet an objection which I 
have often heard made to the teaching that is given by 
the Society, and which is summed up in what is 



SIR JAMES PAGET 85 

regarded as a very wise proverb — that " a little know- 
ledge is a dangerous thing." As with most of the 
merely popular proverbs, the very opposite, if stated 
unconditionally, would be quite as true and quite as 
false ; but in the present instance the objection may 
be met by observing that, in the Society's teaching, 
they who will may learn far more than can fairly be 
called a little knowledge. As I looked through the 
syllabus of such subjects as I can estimate, I could see 
that the amount of teaching in each of them is enough 
for a good beginning for some who may intend to make 
that subject a chief study for their lives, and enough to 
form an important part in the teaching of any one who 
wishes to be, in the fairest sense, generally well educated. 

But, really, as for the proverb, any one observing 
facts may often see that, in all practical life, a little 
knowledge is far less dangerous thanks complete ignor- 
ance. Whether either of them be dangerous depends 
on a man's temper and general character, not on his 
intellect ; it depends on whether he is habitually rash 
or prudent, humble or conceited ; and seeing that, as a 
rule, none have so few doubts as they that are quite 
ignorant, and as their ignorance includes a total want 
of self-knowledge, so there are none more dangerously 
rash than the very ignorant are apt to be. 

Now, scientific study may be so pursued as to help 
to the acquirement of self-knowledge as well as of the 
knowledge of other facts. Its utility is, at least, two- 
fold : direct, in the facts and general principles which 
may be learned ; and indirect, in the cultivation and 
refreshment of the mind. 

As for the use of knowing the chief facts of 
science, or of any branch of it, this may seem to be 



86 UNIVERSITY EXTENSION ADDRESSES 

proved in every hour that we live. For the practical 
applications of science extend into every occupation of 
life ; into the provision of every kind of food ; into the 
management of the air we breathe, and of the light 
and heat in which we are to work ; they are so 
influential in every form of business, in every art and 
manufacture, that it might seem impossible to live in 
safety without some scientific knowledge. It may, 
indeed, be said, and often with much truth, that all 
these applications of science are best left to those who 
have studied them as the chief business of their lives, 
and who must know best about them. This is often 
true ; but even experts can best guide those who know 
something of their language, and they may- best be 
controlled and assisted and most safely trusted by 
those who know the real value of scientific study and 
of the truths to which it can attain ; by those who, 
while studying the facts of science, have studied also, 
as I have said, the methods by which the facts have 
been acquired and made sure. 

Now I will speak of four chief portions of this 
education of the mind ; but let me say that they are 
only a part of all that may be gained. They are 
educations (1) in the power of observing ; (2) in 
accuracy ; (3) in the difficulty of ascertaining truth ; 
(4) in proceeding from the knowledge of what is 
proved to the thinking of what is probable ; and for 
all these ends I shall try to illustrate the value and 
the need of very careful study by showing their diffi- 
culties. The glories and the triumphs of science are 
often celebrated ; some of its failures and difficulties 
may better illustrate the necessity for earnest study by 
those who would be successful in it. 



SIR JAMES PAGET 87 

(1) By education in the power of observing, I mean 
not only the power of seeing things, but that of seeing 
and observing them in their various relations to things 
around them. Many suppose that this is easy ; really 
it is very difficult, and few overcome the difficulty 
except those who are either naturally endowed with 
an unusual power of observing accurately, or have 
been carefully trained and are constantly training 
themselves. 

The difficulty of observing is proved by nearly 
every discovery ; for, in nearly every instance, the dis- 
covery is made by the accurate observation of facts 
which have been within the reach of many, but have 
been overlooked by all except the discoverers. 

In my own profession, with its hundreds of careful 
observers, not a year passes, scarcely a month or a 
week, in which there is not made known some form of 
disease, or some symptom of disease, previously un- 
observed ; and when it is thus made known it is at 
once evident to many who had overlooked it ; they 
may have seen it, they did not observe it. And the 
same might be said, I think, of nearly every scientific 
pursuit, in natural history, in chemistry, and physics. 
Look at the proceedings of any scientific society ; 
see the new facts of which they tell. Could not 
many of them have been observed long ago ? Obvious 
as the facts are now, why were they not sooner ascer- 
tained ? Because observation is really very difficult 
even to those who are keen and watchful and ambi- 
tious of discovery, and many of whom have been well 
trained. 

This is equally evident in the study of the works of 
those who have been most successful, and whom we 



88 UNIVERSITY EXTENSION ADDRESSES 

justly count amongst the greatest observers. Look at 
the works of Darwin ; and here let me say that every 
scientific study should include the reading, not only of 
the best manuals, but of some of the works of at least 
one great master ; for even if the facts he tells have 
become part of popular knowledge, yet the method of 
his work may be a lesson for all ages. I say, read 
Darwin's works or his life ; see the constant repeated 
looking for facts that they might be observed again 
and again ; the looking for them in all changing cir- 
cumstances ; the tests applied ; the doubts that would 
have made a less patient man nearly hopeless ; and 
from all these things reckon how great must be the 
difficulty of accurate observation, how great the need 
of careful cultivation of all the power of observing 
which we may possess. And you may note that a 
large part of Darwin's observations were made on 
things that nearly every one could have seen. Any one 
of his contemporaries might have studied the work of 
earth-worms, say in Hyde Park, when again and again 
we could see the heaps of mould thrown up by them, 
and themselves crawling about in the mornings after 
showers. We saw them, but no more observed them, 
no more thought of them, than we did of the drifting 
clouds or of the dust-carts. 

I mention this facility of opportunities for observa- 
tion, because many are prone to think that for 
scientific study you must have laboratories and costly 
apparatus and hours every day to spare, and that 
these things are impossible to the vast majority of the 
students in this Society's classes. The city of London 
is a very good place in which, by one of many 
examples, to disprove this. You know Sir John 



SIR JAMES PAGET 89 

Lubbock and his charming scientific works on Ants 
and Bees, and in a wide range of natural history. It 
would be hard to find a better naturalist in this range 
of study ; but it would be just as hard to find a 
better man of business, or one more earnest in political 
life, or in the kindly social purposes in which he uses 
all its opportunities ; and it would be hard to find one 
more ready to promote by his own efforts all that is 
good in social and scientific work. Eemember his 
example when you have to listen to the nonsense 
talked about the study of science being incompatible 
with a life in business. 

And this reminds me to say that an intimate 
association of science with business may be very 
useful if it makes it more clear to some men of 
science that, by carrying on their researches till they 
attain an immediate practical utility, they may vastly 
increase the means for acquiring more knowledge. It 
is strange how often, and with what heavy loss, at 
least for a time, scientific men, as if for want of 
enterprise, have stopped short of this. Some years 
ago I studied and wrote on the history of the dis- 
covery of anaesthetics. 1 It is too long to tell now, but 
it shows that before the discovery was made, it was, 
as we may say, within reach of Sir Humphry Davy, 
Faraday, and others among the best. men of science of 
their time. It was really made by such as may be 
called practical men using scientific facts. I can 
briefly tell another instance of such stopping short 
which may seem yet more remarkable. It was told 
to me by my brother, Sir George Paget, who, more 
than fifty years ago, attended the lectures on chemistry 

1 Nineteenth Century, Dec. 1879. 



90 UNIVERSITY EXTENSION ADDRESSES 

at Cambridge by Professor Gumming. The Professor, 
when describing to his class the discovery by (Ersted 
of the power of an electric current to deflect a 
magnet, used to say — " Here, then, are the elements 
which would excellently serve for a system of tele- 
graphy " ; and yet neither he nor any of the active 
and cultivated men who heard him moved onward 
to the discovery and invention by which not only the 
use, but the knowledge of electric science has been so 
increased. 1 

All these things may show the difficulty of observa- 
tion and the need of earnestness and watchfulness in 
observing. Of course it cannot be learned without 
practice, and you may ask, Where can we practise 
scientific observation here in London ? I might 
answer, anywhere — even in natural history, you may 
study the habits of the London wild birds ; there are 
many besides the sparrows ; or you may study the 
wild plants on any piece of ground left undisturbed 
for two or three years. Long ago, when I studied 
botany, there was such a piece of ground, scarcely 
bigger than this hall, near my father's house in Yar- 
mouth, and there I found more than fifty species. 
The origin of such plants, whether from seeds in the 
ground or from those in the air, how far one can 
exclude another, the influence of London atmosphere, 
their attraction of insects, and many other things, 
would be worth observing. At least, in these and the 
like things you may learn how to observe, and then you 
will love to observe, and then some srood will come of it. 

1 In the Home Life of Sir David Brewster, 1869, is an account of a 
method of electric telegraphy used in 1753 by Mr. Morison of Greenock, 
and published in the Scots Magazine of that year. 



SIR JAMES PAGET 91 

(2) Let me speak now of that second advantage of 
scientific study : its teaching of accuracy — accuracy not 
only in observing, but in recording, remembering, and 
arranging facts. 

I hardly need say that accuracy is essential both 
to the maintenance and to the progress of knowledge. 
All would hold this, but different persons have very 
different standards of what they would call accuracy, 
and many have a very low standard of it. Here then, 
again, I would urge you to study and imitate the 
work of some true master in science. The works in 
exact science or in mathematics would, I suppose, be 
best ; but of these I cannot speak, and I hope it is 
with no foolish pride in what has been best in my own 
studies if I believe that, in all the sciences of observa- 
tion, there is nothing more accurate than is the 
description of the human body in the chief books on 
human anatomy. There is not a part visible to the 
naked eye, and within reach of the most minute 
dissection, which is not so exactly described that the 
description can bear the tests of close examination 
again and again repeated every year, in every ana- 
tomical school. And even beyond this, the minute 
parts of every structure have been examined with the 
highest powers of the microscope, and accurately de- 
scribed and drawn. Take this as the standard of 
accuracy to which you should try to attain. 

And I think I can be nearly sure that a great part 
of this accuracy is due to the habit which many 
anatomists have of writing descriptions of what they 
observe while the objects are before them. I have 
had so much experience of this in the making of 
museum catalogues that I cannot doubt its utility. 



92 UNIVERSITY EXTENSION ADDRESSES 

Looking and writing, looking and writing, looking and 
correcting again and again ; thus at length may come 
an accurate description. And, surely, this is only 
after the custom of every good painter of scenery or 
portraits. He may make clever sketches of what he 
remembers to have seen, but for a complete likeness 
he looks, may be, twenty times at everything, and 
paints exactly what he sees. So should all who 
would be accurate in scientific records ; science should 
not be less accurate than art can be. 

I think this scientific cultivation of accuracy can- 
not be too strongly urged. It may be one of the 
happiest means of teaching accuracy in speaking, and 
in thinking, and in designing new lines in which to 
continue one's course of study. And it may be very 
useful in ordinary life. Look at its opposite in the 
boundless mischiefs of inaccuracy, and these not 
always from dishonest people, but from the careless, 
the inconsiderate, the prejudiced. Do we not all 
know people, good people too, who would not for their 
lives tell a lie, but seem as if they could not for their 
lives tell the truth ? 

(3) All this may fairly lead to my speaking of the 
utility of learning in scientific study the difficulty of 
ascertaining truth. This difficulty is shown in all the 
facts I have been speaking of; yet in many of the 
ordinary affairs of life it is assumed to be trivial, or, 
more remarkably, there are very wide differences of 
custom due to different estimates of this difficulty. 
Any newspaper will illustrate these differences. See, 
first, what is done to ascertain truth in courts of law, 
say for a case of theft or in an action for slander. 
Every one who is to state the facts is examined on his 



SIR JAMES PAGET 93 

oath; then he may be cross-examined, to detect wilful 
errors, lapses of memory, or any other inaccuracy. 
Facts on both sides must be thus heard. Then there 
follow pleadings for both sides, and each side may say 
the best it can for itself, the worst it can for the 
other; then comes a careful recital of the evidence 
and an impartial summing-up by the judge ; and then 
the deliberation of twelve men deemed fit to decide 
what is true, and who have sworn on oath that they 
will do so if they can. Thus they decide, and yet 
there may be an appeal, and the whole question may 
be raised again. 

Now no reasonable person would desire less care 
than this for finding what is true when justice is to be 
done, especially when, on one side or the other, there 
may be attempts to conceal the truth or to tell un- 
truths. But surely the contrast is too great between 
this just care and the carelessness with which, under 
other conditions, statements are accepted as true. I 
might draw the contrast from any mere private reports 
of slander, or from any other part of a newspaper, 
say the report of a contested election, in which one 
may read how the opposite views as to matters of fact 
as well as of opinion are maintained by vehemently 
opponent pleadings, and then without any cool dis- 
passionate summing-up, without much deliberation, 
each side is positive that it has the truth, and that 
even on matters of fact it is right and the other is 
utterly wrong. But I need not multiply instances; 
let any one only think of the grounds on which he is 
ready to accept as true any ordinary statement, and 
compare these with what would be required if that 
statement were to be tested in a court of law. 



94 UNIVERSITY EXTENSION ADDRESSES 

Of course we cannot apply these legal tests to all 
the things that come before us, but at least we should 
educate ourselves towards the wish for similar accu- 
racy, towards the habit of judging of probabilities 
according to the care given to find the truth. And 
this is just what scientific study may do for us, by 
showing us how truth is only reached by repeated 
observations, by experiments and tests, by records and 
revisions, by discussions in societies, in journals, in 
reviews, by all the means that may detect fallacies 
and bring out the mere truth. 

It is thus that science may justify itself in claiming 
credit for encouraging the love of truth ; and I think 
it may fairly do so ; for the desire for truth in one 
department of the mind will usually tend to increase 
the desire for it in other parts, and the love of scientific 
truth does, I believe, sustain and increase the love of 
moral truth. 

But the having spoken of the attainment of truth 
in courts of law suggests to me to remind you that 
the oath makes a witness promise to tell the truth, the 
whole truth, and nothing but the truth, and in large 
ranges of science, though the truth and nothing but 
the truth may be attained, yet the whole truth very 
seldom can be. This is especially the case with the 
sciences that have to do with living things ; for in 
these everything is in relation with so many and 
variable conditions that it is very hard to arrive at an 
unconditional conclusion. Few things are absolute. 
A distinguished French surgeon used to say that there 
were two words that a surgeon should never use, 
namely, " jamais " and " toujours." The same prin- 
ciple is maintained, I think, by Mr. Gilbert in H.M.S. 



SIR JAMES PAGET 95 

Pinafore, " Never ? what never ? well, hardly ever." 
Certainly it is illustrated in biology. 

Nothing might seem more constant than the like- 
ness of offspring to their parents ; but the likeness is 
with difference, and we know not why. The rule of 
likeness between the two lateral halves of many animals 
and leaves of plants is very general ; but the likeness 
is very rarely exact, and we know not why. In the 
organic world nature is not mathematically exact — 
not uniformly constant — at least in so far as we can 
yet see ; and we do not know the reasons of the 
deviations. 

Now, it is well to bear all this in mind, and to feel 
that when we talk of exceptions and chances and the 
like, though we are very apt to persuade ourselves 
that we are talking of just and final conclusions, yet 
really we may be only shifting away from the con- 
fession of the imperfection of our knowledge ; we may 
be wrongly persuading ourselves that we have not 
only the truth, but the whole truth. Scientific study 
will teach you that exceptions to admitted laws are 
really examples of other laws not yet accurately ascer- 
tained ; and that the events which we refer to chance, 
as if it were a determiuing force, are only some of 
those of which we have not traced the precedents. 
Exceptions, chances, and such like words, relate en- 
tirely to things of which we have as yet very imperfect 
knowledge or none at all ; our hope must be that the 
number of such things will be diminished by scientific 
study. 

(4) And now let me say something of that last 
method of education of the mind by scientific study, 
which may teach it how to proceed from the knowledge 



96 UNIVERSITY EXTENSION ADDRESSES 

of what is proved to the thinking of what is probable. 
I shall not discuss the values or rules of safe induc- 
tion or deduction from facts ; it should be done in the 
language of logic, but that is a language which I can- 
not speak ; and I suspect you may learn the rules 
better in the lives or works of some of the great 
masters in science. Say, again, if you like, of Darwin, 
or, if you have time, in such a book as Whe well's 
History of the Inductive Sciences. If you read 
Darwin, observe the immense quantity of facts he 
gathered before he enunciated his induction as to the 
law of natural selection, the doubts he felt and then 
slowly dispersed, the suspicions of error which pre- 
ceded his conviction of the truth. And then study 
his caution as to what might be deduced from it ; his 
anxiety for facts which might test his belief or his 
guesses ; how different from the confidence with which 
some people seem to think it easy to explain every- 
thing. 

I am sure I cannot too strongly urge you thus to 
study the difficulties of scientific thinking before you 
venture to practise it. I love to quote a saying of the 
greatest of all scientific workers in my profession — 
John Hunter. He used to say to his pupils, " Don't 
think : try." He meant, " Don't think that you can 
safely decide that, because you know some things to 
be true, therefore some others must be true ; ' try ' 
whether they are, test them, watch them ; do not be 
ready to say positively, ' From this it follows,' or any- 
thing of that kind ; ' try ' whether it does." And the 
whole history of science proves his wisdom ; for, 
though it is a glorious history of progress in know- 
ledge, yet every page is disfigured by the examples of 



SIR JAMES PAGET 97 

hindrances of that progress by errors ; and the vast 
majority of these are errors, not of observation, but of 
thinking. Men have said that knowledge is power, 
and they have tried too soon to grasp it ; and they 
have grasped at the shadows of it, at the shadows cast 
by themselves while by their erroneous thinking they 
obstructed the light of truth. 

Now, you may ask, what is to be the reward of all 
this study ? Would not some other knowledge, in the 
pursuit of which there is less risk of error, less need 
of all these cautions, serve as well ? I do not believe 
there is ? I do not believe there is one more useful 
or more happy -making than is scientific study. I 
have read the admirable address on the study of 
literature given here last year by Mr. John Morley, 
but it has not converted me. I must hold still to the 
preference for the teaching of science and to its utility 
for every part and manner of life. Surely there is no 
one in any calling who may not be the better for 
having studied and practised careful observation and 
accuracy, and the habit of ascertaining truth and of 
thinking cautiously ; and in science all these and many 
other of the best mental qualities may be cultivated 
even while we are gaining the power and happiness 
of knowledge. And scientific knowledge is power. 
Think of the telegraph and telephone ! look, when you 
leave this hall, at those wires overhead, and think of 
those underground ; think of the incessant talking and 
writing that is going on along those wires — the carry- 
ing of questions and answers on all the interests of 
life over hundreds of miles in a few seconds — the 
bringing near of the minds of thousands who are far 
apart — the inestimable aids to happiness and utility. 

H 



98 UNIVERSITY EXTENSION ADDRESSES 

It was the power of scientific knowledge that did 
this. 

Think of the abolition of pain by anaesthetics, or of 
all the utilities of photography in its profoundest 
scientific researches, in historic records, in the domestic 
happiness that even the poorest may have while they 
can see around them the memorial portraits of those 
that are far off. It was the power of scientific know- 
ledge that did this. 

Nay, look anywhere ; see if you can find a place in 
all this land where there is not evidence that scientific 
knowledge is power for the welfare of men. And 
though we may not become of the number of those by 
w T hom great discoveries are made, yet it is no trivial 
thing to be members of the same class with them, to 
know their language, to be able to admire their power 
and skill and victorious work, even as it is a just 
pride to be among the people of a mighty nation, 
though we may add nothing to its power. 

And scientific knowledge is happiness. Every one 
who possesses any fair share of it and uses it well will 
tell you so, and for those who are engaged in various 
daily occupations it may be the truest and best mental 
recreation ; for recreation is not mere idleness, not 
mere absolute rest after work ; the best recreation is a 
willing, active occupation in something quite unlike the 
ordinary business of one's life. And I think it may 
be said of scientific study that it is remarkably fit for 
satisfying some of the natural desires of the mind 
which are least likely to be satisfied in the regular 
business of life, or are only satisfied by being misused. 
There is the natural love of novelty, the desire for the 
satisfaction of curiosity. It is hard to satisfy them in 



SIR JAMES PAGET 99 

ordinary routine; very easy to do so in gossip and 
credulity ; much better, surely, to do so in the un- 
bounded stores and progress of science. 

And there is the love of wonders ; it is hard to 
satisfy it with anything, however marvellous and 
admirable, with which every day's work makes one 
familiar. We must all, I think, have seen this when 
we have been looking at some marvellous machinery, 
some machine working with such precision, such cal- 
culated accuracy, such definite purpose, that we might 
imagine the mind of its inventor to be dwelling in it. 
We have stood still in wonder, and yet the workman 
feels none; to him every movement is foreseen, the 
purpose is well known, there is no happiness of 
novelty, no strange sight, no thought of wonder. 

To the scientific student there are new wonders 
everywhere. Let me tell the last that I observed. 
Mademoiselle Janotha was so good as to play on the 
piano, at my request, one of the swiftest pieces of 
music known to her, a presto by Mendelssohn. The 
time it occupied was taken, and the number of notes 
was counted. She played 5995 notes in four minutes 
and three seconds — rather more than twenty -four 
notes per second. We may from this estimate, ap- 
proximately, the number of what we may call nervous 
vibrations transmitted during a given time from and 
to the brain ; from the brain to the muscles ; and 
from the muscles and the organs of hearing and of 
touch to the brain. Each note required at least two 
voluntary movements of a finger, — the bending down 
and the raising up ; and besides these there were a 
very large number of lateral movements to and fro of 
the fingers, as well as many and various movements of 



100 UNIVERSITY EXTENSION ADDB.ESSES 

the wrists, elbows, shoulders, and feet. It was not 
possible to count these, but I think I can be sure that 
they were not less than at the rate of one movement 
for each note, making, altogether, not less than three 
voluntary movements for each note, even if we allow 
for the chords in which several notes were struck at 
the same instant. Certainly there were not less than 
seventy-two distinctive variations in the currents of 
nerve-force transmitted from the brain to muscles in 
each second, and each of these variations was deter- 
mined by a distinct effort of the will. And observe, 
for herein may seem a chief wonder, each of these 
movements was directed by the will to a certain place, 
with a certain force and a certain speed, at a certain 
time; and each touch was maintained for a certain 
length of time. Thus there were, as we may say, 
five distinct and designed qualities in each of the 
seventy-two movements in each second. 

Moreover, each of these movements, determined by 
the will and exactly effected by transmission of nerve- 
force from the brain along nerve-fibres to the muscles 
— each of these movements was associated with con- 
sciousness of the very position of each finger, each 
hand, each arm, and each foot, before it was moved 
and while moving it, and with consciousness of the 
sound of each note and of the force of each touch. 
Thus, there were at least four conscious sensations for 
each of the twenty-four notes in each second; that is, 
there were at the rate of ninety-six transmissions of 
force from the ends of nerve-fibres, along their course 
to the brain, in each of the same seconds during which 
there were seventy-two transmissions going out from 
the brain along other nerve-fibres to the muscles. 



SIR JAMES PAGET 101 

And then, add to all this, that during the time, in 
each second of which the mind was conscious of at 
least ninety-six sensations, and directed not less than 
seventy-two movements, it was also remembering each 
note to be played in its due time and place, and was 
exercised, with the judgment, in the comparison of the 
playing of this evening with those of times before, and 
with some of the sentiments which the music was 
intended to express. It was played from memory, but 
Mademoiselle Janotha assures me that she could have 
played it as swiftly at sight, though this would have 
added another to the four sensations associated with 
each note. 

Surely, it is impossible to imagine what goes on in 
a brain thus occupied ; I think it is most impossible, 
if that may be said, to one who has seen a brain and 
has carefully examined it. Eeally, it is inconceivable ; 
and here I will end, for here is a lesson for the most 
serious thoughts. In facts such as these science 
achieves the knowledge of the reality of things more 
wonderful than the imagination can conceive; it 
sustains the faith which holds that many things that 
are inconceivable are yet surely true. 



SOME LESSONS OE ANTIQUITY 

By Professor IV^Max Muller, LL.D. 

1889 

A well-known student once expressed his admiration 
for Oxford by saying that it would be Paradise 
Eegained if only the long vacation lasted the whole 
year. But remember, he was not an idle Fellow, but 
one of those who construe vacare with a dative, when it 
means to be free from all interruptions for the pursuit 
of study. Well, this peaceful sanctuary of Oxford was 
suddenly changed last summer into a perfect bee-hive. 
The colleges, the libraries, the gardens, the streets, the 
river were all swarming with visitors. As the clock 
struck, from ten in the morning till five in the after- 
noon, streams of gentlemen and ladies were seen 
coming out and going back to the lecture -rooms. 
Every lecture-room was as full as it could hold, and 
the eager faces and the quick-moving pens and pencils 
showed that the students had come on earnest busi- 
ness bent. It was, in fact, a realised dream of what a 
University might be, or what it ought to be, perhaps 
what it will be again, when the words of our President 
are taken to heart that " man needs knowledge, not 



PROFESSOR MAX MULLER 103 

only as a means of livelihood, but as a means of 
life." 

This sudden metamorphosis of Oxford was due to 
the first meeting of students under the University 
Extension system. They had been invited to reside in 
Oxford for the first ten days in August. Nearly a 
thousand availed themselves of this invitation, of 
whom about seven hundred were University Extension 
students from the Oxford, Cambridge, and London 
Centres. Sixty-one lectures were delivered during the 
ten days on Literature, History, Economics, and Science. 
Besides these lectures, conferences were held for dis- 
cussing questions connected with Extended University 
teaching. All these lectures and conferences were 
remarkably well attended from beginning to end, and 
yet there was time for afternoon excursions and social 
gatherings. The antiquities of Oxford, the Colleges, 
Libraries, and Chapels were well explored, generally 
under the guidance of the Head or the Fellows of 
each college. The success of the whole undertaking, 
thanks very much to the exertions of Mr. Sadler 
and Mr. Hewins, was so brilliant that at the end of 
the meeting it was unanimously decided to repeat 
the experiment next year. 

To my mind that gathering at Oxford, though it 
was but little noticed by the outer world, was an 
historical event, the beginning of a new era in the 
history of national education. And I rejoiced that 
this new growth should have sprung from the old 
Universities, because it had thus secured a natural soil 
and an historical foundation on which to strike root, 
to grow, and to flourish. 

There is no doubt a strong feeling abroad that the 



104 UNIVERSITY EXTENSION ADDRESSES 

instruction which is given by the old Universities is 
antiquated and useless in the fierce struggle for exist- 
ence. We are told that we teach dead languages, dead 
literatures, dead philosophy, as if there could be such 
a thing as a dead language, a dead literature, a dead 
philosophy. Is Greek a dead language ? It lives not 
only in the spoken Greek, it runs like fire through the 
veins of all European speech. Is Homer, is iEschylos, 
is Sophocles a dead poet ? They live in Milton, 
Eacine, and Goethe, and I defy any one to under- 
stand and enjoy even such living poets as Tennyson 
or Browning without having breathed at school or at 
the Universities the language and thought of those 
ancient classics. Is Plato a dead philosopher ? It is 
impossible for two or three philosophers to gather 
together without Plato being in the midst of them. 

I should say, on the contrary, that all living 
languages, all living literatures, all living philosophy 
would be dead, if you cut the historical fibres by which 
they cling to their ancient soil. What is the life- 
blood of French, Italian, and Spanish, if not Latin ? 
You may call French an old and wizened speech, not 
Latin. You may call Comte's philosophy effete, but 
not that of Aristotle. You may see signs of degeneracy 
in the mushroom growth of our modern novels, not in 
the fresh and life-like idylls of Nausikaa or Penelope. 

Let me not be misunderstood. I do not want 
everybody to be a classical scholar or antiquarian, but 
I hold that it is the duty of all University teaching 
never to lose touch with the past. It seems to me the 
highest aim of all knowledge to try to understand 
what is, by learning how it has come to be what it is. 
That is the true meaning of history, and that seems to 



PROFESSOR MAX MULLER 105 

me the kind of knowledge which schools and Universities 
are called upon to cultivate and to teach. I believe 
it is in the end the more useful knowledge also. It 
is safe and sound, and by being safe and sound, it not 
only enriches the intellect, but it forms and strengthens 
the character of a man. A man who knows what 
honest and thorough knowledge means, in however 
small a sphere, will never allow himself to be a mere 
dabbler or smatterer, whatever subject he may have to 
deal with in later life. He may abstain, but he will 
not venture in. 

What is the original meaning of all instruction ? 
It is tradition. It was from the beginning the handing 
over of the experience of one generation to the other, 
the establishment of some kind of continuity between 
the past, the present, and the future. This most 
primitive form of education and instruction marks 
everywhere the beginning of civilised life and the very 
dawn of history. 

History begins when the father explains to his son 
how the small world in which he has to live came to 
be what it is ; when the present generation accepts the 
inheritance of the past, and hands down a richer heir- 
loom to the future ; when, in fact, the present feels 
itself connected and almost identified with the future 
and the past. It is this solidarity, as the French call 
it, this consciousness of a common responsibility, which 
distinguishes the civilised and historical from the un- 
civilised and unhistorical races of the world. 

There are races for whom the ideas of the past and 
the future seem hardly to exist. We call them un- 
civilised races, savages, ephemeral beings that are born 
and die without leaving any trace behind them. The 



106 UNIVERSITY EXTENSION ADDRESSES • 

only bond which connects them with the past is their 
language, possibly their religion, and a few customs 
and traditions which descend to their successors with- 
out any effort on either side. 

But there were other races — not many — who cared 
for the future and the past, who were learners and 
teachers, the founders of civilised life, and the first 
makers of history. Such were the Egyptians and the 
Babylonians, and those who afterwards followed their 
example — the Persians, Greeks, and Eomans. To us it 
seems quite natural that the ancient Egyptians and 
Babylonians should have erected monuments of an 
almost indestructible character, and covered them with 
inscriptions to tell, not only the next generation, but 
all generations to come, what they had achieved during 
their short sojourn on earth. Why should they and 
they alone have conceived such an idea ? The common 
answer is, because they possessed the art of writing. 
But the truer answer would be that they invented 
and perfected the art of writing because they had some- 
thing to say and something to write, because they 
wished to communicate something to their children, 
their grandchildren, and to generations to come. 

They would have carried out their object even 
without hieroglyphic, hieratic, and demotic alphabets. 
Eor we see that even among so-called savage tribes, 
in some of the Polynesian islands, for instance, a desire 
to perpetuate their deeds manifests itself in a kind of 
epic or historical poetry. These poems tell of wars, of 
victories and defeats, of conquests and treaties of peace. 
As writing is unknown in these islands, these poems 
are commited to memory and entrusted to the safe 
keeping of a separate caste, who are, as it were, the 



PROFESSOR MAX MULLER 107 

living archives of the island. They are the highest 
authorities on questions of disputed succession, on the 
doubtful landmarks of tribes, and the boundaries of 
families. And these poems are composed according 
to such strict rules and preserved with such minute 
care, that when they have to be recited as evidence on 
disputed frontiers any fraudulent alteration would 
easily be detected. Mere prose evidence is regarded 
as no evidence at all ; it must be poetical, metrical, 
and archaic. 

Whenever this thought springs up in the human 
mind, that we live not only for ourselves, but that we 
owe a debt to the future for what we have received 
from the past, the world enters upon a new stage; it 
becomes historical. The work which was begun 
tentatively in the hieroglyphic inscriptions of Egypt 
was carried on in the cuneiform records of Babylon, 
in the mountain edicts of Darius and Xerxes, till it 
reached Greece and Eome, and there culminated in 
the masterworks of such historians as Herodotus and 
Thucydides, Livy and Tacitus. 

It may seem to you that these early beginnings of 
tradition and history are far removed from us, and that 
the knowledge which we possess and which we wish 
to hand down to future generations in schools and 
Universities is of a totally different character. But 
this is really not the case. We are what we are, we 
possess what we possess even in the very elements of 
our knowledge, thanks to the labours of the ancient 
Egyptians, Babylonians, Indians, Persians, to say 
nothing of Greeks and Eomans. 

What should we be without our ABC, without 
being able to write ? Mere illiterate savages, knowing 



108 UNIVERSITY EXTENSION ADDRESSES " 

nothing of the past except by hearsay, caring little for 
the future except for our own immediate posterity. 
Now whenever we read a book or write a letter we 
ought to render thanks in our heart to the ancient 
scholars of Egypt who invented and perfected writing, 
and whose alphabetic signs are now used over the 
whole civilised world, with the exception of China. 
Yes, whenever you write an a or a b or a c you write 
what was originally a hieroglyphic picture. Your 
L is the crouching lion, your F the cerastes, a serpent 
with two horns; your H the Egyptian picture of a 
sieve. 

There is no break, no missing link between our 
ABC and the hieroglyphic letters as you see them 
on the obelisk on the Thames Embankment and on 
the much older monuments in Egypt. The Egyptians 
handed their letters to the Phoenicians, the Phoenicians 
to the Greeks, the Greeks to the Eomans, the Eomans 
to us. All the Semitic alphabets also, as used in 
Persian and Arabic, and the more important alphabets 
of India, Ceylon, Burmah, and Siam, all come in the 
end from Phoenicia and Egypt. The whole of Asia, 
except that part of it which is overshadowed by 
Chinese influence, Europe, America, Africa, and 
Australia, so far as they write at all, all write Egyptian 
hieroglyphics. The chain of tradition has never been 
broken, the stream of evolution is more perfect here 
than anywhere else. 

Pleading and writing, therefore, have come to us 
from ancient Egypt. But whence did we get our 
arithmetic? When I say our arithmetic I do not 
mean our numerals only, or our knowledge that two 
and two make four. That kind of knowledge is 



PROFESSOR MAX MULLER 109 

home-grown, and can be traced back to that common 
Aryan home from which we derive our language, that 
is to say, our whole intellectual inheritance. I mean 
our numerical figures. There are many people who have 
numerals, but no numerical figures like our own. 
There are others, such as the Chiquitos in Columbia, 
who count with their fingers, but have no numerals 
at all ; at least we are told so by the few travellers 
who have visited them. 1 There are others, again, who 
have a very perfect system of numerals, but who for 
numerical notation depend either on an abacus or on 
such simple combinations of strokes as we find in 
Egypt, Phoenicia, Babylon, China, India, and even 
among the redskins of America. There are others, 
again, like the Greeks and the Hindus, who under 
certain circumstances use letters of their alphabet 
instead of figures. 

You may imagine that with such contrivances 
arithmetic could never have advanced to its present 
stage of perfection, unless some one had invented our 
numerical figures. Whence then did we get our 
figures ? "We call them Arabic figures, and that tells 
its own tale. But the Arabs call them Indian figures, 
and that tells its own tale likewise. Our figures came 
to us from the Arabs in Spain, they came to them 
from India, and if you consider what we should be 
without our figures from one to nine, I think you will 
admit that we owe as much gratitude to India for our 
arithmetic as to Egypt for our reading and writing. 
When I am sometimes told that the Hindus were 
mere dreamers, and never made any useful discovery, 

1 Brett, History of the British Colonies in the West Indies, 4th ed., 
London, 1887. 



110 UNIVERSITY EXTENSION ADDRESSES 

such as our steam-engines and electric telegraphs, I 
tell my friends they invented that without which 
mechanical and electric science could never have 
become what they are, that without which we should 
never have had steam-engines or electric telegraphs — 
they invented our figures from 1 to 9 ; and more than 
that, they invented the nought, the sign for nothing — 
one of the most useful discoveries ever made, as all 
mathematicians will tell you. 

Let us remember then the lessons which we have 
learnt from antiquity. We have learnt reading and 
writing from Egypt, we have learnt arithmetic from 
India. So much for the famous three E's. 

But that is not all. If we are Egyptians whenever 
we read and write, and Indians whenever we do our 
accounts, we have only to look at our watches to see 
that we are Babylonians also. We must go to the 
British Museum to see what a cuneiform inscription 
is like ; but it is a fact, nevertheless, that every one of 
us carries something like a cuneiform inscription in 
his waistcoat pocket. For why is our hour divided 
into sixty minutes, each minute into sixty seconds, 
and so forth ? Simply and solely because in Babylonia 
there existed, by the side of the decimal system of 
notation, another system, the sexagesimal, which 
counted by sixties. Why that number should have 
been chosen is clear enough, and it speaks well for the 
practical sense of those ancient Babylonian merchants. 
There is no number which has so many divisors as 
sixty. 

The Babylonians divided the sun's daily journey 
into 24 parasangs or 720 stadia. Each parasang or 
hour was subdivided into 60 minutes. A parasang 



PROFESSOR MAX MULLER 111 

is about a German mile, and Babylonian astronomers 
compared the progress made by the sun during one 
hour at the time of the equinox to the progress made 
by a good walker during the same time, both accom- 
plishing 1 parasang. The whole course of the sun 
during the 24 equinoctial hours was fixed at 24 
parasangs or 720 stadia, or 360 degrees. This system 
was handed on to the Greeks, and Hipparchus, the 
great Greek philosopher, who lived about 150 B.C., 
introduced the Babylonian hour into Europe. Ptolemy, 
who wrote about 150 A.D., and whose name still lives 
in that of the Ptolemaic system of astronomy, gave 
still wider currency to the Babylonian way of reckoning 
time. It was carried along on the quiet stream of 
traditional knowledge through the Middle Ages, and, 
strange to say, it sailed down safely over the Niagara 
of the French Eevolution. For the French, when 
revolutionising weights, measures, coins, and dates, 
and subjecting all to the decimal system of reckoning, 
were induced by some unexplained motive to respect 
our clocks and watches, and to allow our dials to 
remain sexagesimal, that is, Babylonian, each hour 
consisting of 60 minutes. Here you see again the 
wonderful coherence of the world, and how what we 
call knowledge is the result of an unbroken tradition, 
of a teaching descending from father to son. Not 
more than about a hundred arms would reach from us 
to the builders of the palaces of Babylon, and enable 
us to shake hands with the founders of the oldest 
pyramids, and to thank them for what they have done 
for us. 

And allow me to point out what I consider most 
important in these lessons of antiquity. They are not 



112 UNIVERSITY EXTENSION ADDRESSES 

mere guesses or theories ; they are statements resting 
on historical facts, on evidence that cannot be shaken. 
Suppose five thousand years hence, or, let us be more 
merciful and say fifty thousand years hence, some 
future Schliemann were to run his shafts into the 
ruins of what was once called London, and discover 
among the dSbris of what is now the British Museum 
charred fragments of newspapers, in which some 
Champolion of the future might decipher such names 
as centimetre or millimetre. On the strength of such 
evidence every historian would be justified in asserting 
that the ancient inhabitants of London — we ourselves 
— had once upon a time adopted a new decimal 
system of weights and measures from the French, 
because it was in French, in primeval French only, 
that such words as centimetre or millimetre could 
possibly have been formed. We argue to-day on the 
strength of the same kind of evidence, on the evidence 
chiefly of language and inscriptions, that our dials 
must have come from the Babylonians, our alphabets 
from Egypt, our figures from India. We indulge in 
no guesses, no mere possibilities, but we go back step 
by step from the Times of to-day till we arrive at the 
earliest Babylonian inscription and the most ancient 
hieroglyphic monuments. What lies beyond we leave 
to the theoretic school, which begins its work where 
the work of the historical school comes to an end. 

I could lay before you many more of these lessons 
of antiquity, but the Babylonian dial of my watch 
reminds me that my parasang, or my German mile, or 
my hour, is drawing to an end, and I must confine 
myself to one or two only. You have heard a great 
deal lately of bi-metallism. I am not going to inflict 



PROFESSOR MAX MULLER 113 

on this audience a lecture on that deeply interesting 
subject, certainly not in the presence of our chairman, 
the Lord Mayor, and with the fear of the Chancellor 
of the Exchequer before my eyes. But I may just 
mention this, that when I saw that what the bi- 
metallists were contending for was to fix and main- 
tain in perpetuity a settled ratio between gold and 
silver, I asked myself how this idea arose ; and being 
of an historical turn of mind, I tried to find out 
whether antiquity could have any lessons to teach us 
on this subject. Coined money, as you know, is not 
a very ancient invention. There may have been a 
golden age when gold was altogether unknown, and 
people paid with cows, not with coins. When precious 
metals, gold, silver, copper, or iron began to be used 
for payment, they were at first simply weighed. Even 
we still speak of a pound instead of a sovereign. The 
next step was to issue pieces of gold and silver 
properly weighed, and then to mark the exact weight 
and value on each piece. This was done in Assyria 
and Babylonia, where we find shekels or pounds of 
gold and silver. The commerce of the Eastern nations 
was carried on for centuries by means of these weights 
of metal. It was the Greeks, the Greeks of Phocsea 
in Ionia, who in the seventh century B.C. first con- 
ceived the idea of coining money, that is, of stamping 
on each piece their city arms, the phoca or seal, thus 
giving the warranty of their State for the right weight 
and value of those pieces. From Phocsea this art of 
coining spread rapidly to the other Greek towns of 
Asia Minor, and was thence transplanted to iEgina, the 
Peloponnesus, Athens, and the Greek colonies in Africa 
and in Italy. The weight of the most ancient gold 

I 



114 UNIVERSITY EXTENSION ADDRESSES 

coin in all these countries was originally the same as 
that of the ancient Babylonian gold shekel, only stamped 
with the arms of each country, which thus made itself 
responsible for its proper weight. And this gold 
shekel or pound, in spite of historical disturbances, 
has held its own through centuries. The gold coins 
of Croesus, Darius, Philip, and Alexander have all 
about the same weight as the old Babylonian gold 
shekel, sixty of them going to one mina of gold ; and 
what is stranger still, our own sovereign, or pound, or 
shekel, has nearly the same weight, sixty of them 
going to an old Babylonian mina of gold. In ancient 
times twenty silver drachmas or half-shekels went to 
a gold shekel, just as with us twenty silver shillings 
are equivalent to a sovereign. This ancient shilling 
was again subdivided into sixty copper coins, sixty 
being the favourite Babylonian figure. 

Knowing, therefore, the relative monetary value of 
a gold and silver shekel or half- shekel, knowing how 
many silver shekels the ancient nations had to give 
for one gold shekel, it was possible by merely weigh- 
ing the ancient coins to find out whether there was 
then already any fixed ratio between gold and silver. 
Thousands of ancient coins have thus been tested, and 
the result has been to show that the ratio between 
gold and silver was fixed from the earliest times with 
the most exact accuracy. 

That ratio, as Dr. Brugsch has shown, was 1 to 12J 
in Egypt; it was, as proved by Dr. Brandis, 1 to 13J 
in Babylonia and in all the countries which adopted 
the Babylonian standard. There have been slight 
fluctuations, and there are instances of debased coinage 
in ancient as well as in modern times. But for 



PROFESSOR MAX MULLER 115 

international trade and tribute, the old Babylonian 
standard was maintained for a very long time. 

These numismatic researches, which have been 
carried on with indefatigable industry by some of the 
most eminent scholars in Europe, may seem simply 
curious, but like all historical studies they may also 
convey some lessons. 

They prove that, in spite of inherent difficulties, 
the great political and commercial nations of the 
ancient world did succeed in solving the bi-metallic 
problem, and in maintaining for centuries a fixed 
standard between gold and silver. 

They prove that this standard, though influenced, 
no doubt, by the relative quantity of the two metals, 
by the cost of production, and by the demand for 
either silver or gold in the markets of the ancient 
world, was maintained by the common sense of the 
great commercial nations of antiquity, who were anxious 
to safeguard the interests both of their wholesale and 
retail traders. 1 

They prove, lastly, that though a change in the 
ratio between gold and silver cannot be entirely pre- 
vented, it took place in ancient time by very small 
degrees. From the sixteenth century B.C., or, at all 
events, if we restrict our remarks to coined money, from 
the seventh century B.C. to nearly our own time, the 
appreciation of gold has been no more than 1^, 

1 Some monometallist scholars have denied these facts, but I 
doubt whether they have read Dr. Brandis' learned work, "Das 
Miinzwesin" or whether they have really taken the trouble of 
weighing once more the thousands of gold and silver coins which he 
has weighed, I knew the late Dr. Brandis, and I know that he was a 
careful and truthful scholar. Those who venture to differ from him 
must produce facts, not fads. 



116 UNIVERSITY EXTENSION ADDRESSES 

namely, from 13 J to 15. If now, within our own 
recollection, it has suddenly risen from 15 to 20, 
have we not a right to ask whether this violent dis- 
turbance is due altogether to natural causes, or whether 
what we are told is the effect, is not to a certain 
extent the cause of it — I mean the sudden resolution 
of certain Governments to boycott for their own pur- 
poses the second precious metal of the world. 

But I must not venture farther on this dangerous 
ground, but shall invite you, in conclusion, to turn 
your eyes from the monetary to the intellectual 
currency of the world, from coins to what are called 
the counters of our thoughts. 

The lessons which antiquity has taught us with 
regard to language, its nature, its origin, its growth, 
and decay are more marvellous than any we have 
hitherto considered. 

What is the age of Alexander and Darius, of the 
palaces of Babylon and the pyramids of Egypt, com- 
pared with the age of language, the age of those very 
words which we use every day, and which, forsooth, 
we call modern ? There is nothing more ancient in 
the world than every one of the words which you hear 
me utter at present. 

Take the two words " there is," and you can trace them 
step by step from English to Anglo-Saxon, from Anglo- 
Saxon to Gothic; you can trace them in all the 
Teutonic, Celtic, Slavonic languages, in the languages 
of Darius and Cyrus, in the prayers of Zoroaster, finally 
in the hymns of the Eig Veda. Instead of there is, 
the old Vedic poets said tatra asti. It is the same coin, 
it has the same weight, only it has suffered a little 
by wear and tear during the thousands of years that 



PROFESSOR MAX MULLER 117 

it has passed from hand to hand or from mouth to 
mouth. Those two words would suffice to prove that 
all the languages of the civilised races of Europe, the 
languages of Persia and India also, all sprang from one 
source ; and if you place before your imagination a map 
of Europe and Asia, you would see all the fairest por- 
tions of these two continents, all the countries where 
you can discover historical monuments, temples, 
palaces, forums, churches, or houses of parliament, 
lighted up by the rays of that one language which we 
are speaking ourselves, the Aryan language, the classical 
language of the past, the living language of the present, 
and in the distant future the true Volapiik, the 
language of the world. 

I have no time to speak of the other large streams 
of historical speech, — the Semitic, the Ugro-Altaic, the 
Chinese, the Polynesian, the African, and American. 
But think what a lesson of antiquity has here been 
thrown open to us. We learn that we are bound 
together with all the greatest nations of the world by 
bonds more close, more firm and fast than flesh, or 
bone, or blood could ever furnish. For what is flesh, 
or bone, or blood compared to language ? There is no 
continuity in flesh, and bone, and blood. They come 
and go by what we call birth and death, and they 
change from day to day. In ancient times, in the 
struggle of all against all, when whole tribes were 
annihilated, nations carried away into captivity, slaves 
bought and sold, and the centres of civilised life 
overwhelmed again and again by a deluge of barbarian 
invasions, what chance was there of unmixed blood in 
any part of the world ? But language always remained 
itself, and those who spoke it, whatever their blood 



118 UNIVERSITY EXTENSION ADDRESSES 

may have been, marched in serried ranks along the 
highroad of history as one noble army, as one spiritual 
brotherhood. "What does it matter whether the same 
blood runs in our veins and in the veins of our dark 
fellow-men in India ? Their language is the same, 
and has been the same for thousands of years, as our 
own language ; and whoever knows what language 
means, how language is not only the vestment, but the 
very embodiment of thought, will feel that to be of the 
same language is a great deal more than to be of the 
same flesh and blood. 

With the light which the study of the antiquity of 
language has shed on the past, the whole world has 
been changed. We know now not only what we are, 
but whence we are. We know our common Aryan 
home. We know what we carried away from it, and 
how our common intellectual inheritance has grown 
and grown from century to century till it has reached 
a wealth, unsurpassed anywhere, amounting in English 
alone to 250,000 words. What does it matter whether 
we know the exact latitude and longitude of that 
Aryan home, though among reasonable people there 
is, I believe, very little doubt as to its whereabouts 
"somewhere in Asia." The important point is that 
we know that there was such a home, and that we 
can trace the whole intellectual growth of the Aryan 
family back to roots which sprang from a common 
soil. And we can do this not by mere guesses only, 
or theoretically, but by facts, that is, historically. 
Take any word or thought that now vibrates through 
our mind, and we know now how it was first struck in 
countries far away, and in times so distant that hardly 
any chronology can reach them. If anywhere it is 



PROFESSOR MAX MULLER 119 

in language that we may say, We are what we have 
been. In language everything that is new is old, and 
everything that is old is new. That is true evolution, 
true historical continuity. A man who knows his 
language, and all that is implied by it, stands on a 
foundation of ages. He feels the past under his feet, 
and feels at home in the world of thought, a loyal 
citizen of the oldest and widest republic. 

It is this historical knowledge of language, and not 
of language only, but of everything that has been 
handed down to us by an uninterrupted tradition from 
father to son, it is that kind of knowledge which I 
hold that our Universities and schools should strive to 
maintain. It is the historical spirit with which they 
should try to inspire every new generation. As we trace 
the course of a mighty river back from valley to valley, 
as we mark its tributaries, and watch its meanderings 
till we reach its source, or, at all events, the watershed 
from which its sources spring, in the same manner the 
historical school has to trace every current of human 
knowledge from century to century back to its fountain- 
head, if that is possible, or at all events as near to it 
as the remaining records of the past will allow. The 
true interest of all knowledge lies in its growth. The 
very mistakes of the past form the solid ground on 
which the truer knowledge of the present is founded. 
Would a mathematician be a mathematician who had 
not studied his Euclid ? Would an astronomer be an 
astronomer who did not know the Ptolemaic system of 
astronomy, and had not worked his way through its errors 
to the truer views of Copernicus ? Would a philosopher 
be a philosopher who had never grappled with Plato and 
Aristotle ? Would a lawyer be a lawyer who had 



120 UNIVERSITY EXTENSION ADDRESSES 

never heard of Eoman law ? There is but one key to 
the present — that is the past. There is but one way 
to understand the continuous growth of the human 
mind and to gain a firm grasp of what it has achieved 
in any department of knowledge — that is to watch its 
historical development. 

No doubt it will be said, there is no time for all 
this in the hurry and flurry of our modern life. 
There are so many things to learn that students must 
be satisfied with results, without troubling themselves 
how these results were obtained by the labours of 
those who came before us. This really would mean 
that our modern teaching must confine itself to the 
surface, and keep aloof from what lies beneath, that 
knowledge must be what is called cut and dry, if it 
is to prove serviceable in the open market. 

My experience is the very opposite. The cut-and- 
dry knowledge which is acquired from the study of 
manuals or from so-called crammers is very apt to 
share the fate of cut flowers. It makes a brilliant 
show for one evening, but it fades and leaves nothing 
behind. The only knowledge worth having, and 
which lasts us for life, must not be cut and dry, 
but, on the contrary, must be living and growing 
knowledge, knowledge of which we know the begin- 
ning, the middle, and the end, knowledge of which we 
can produce the title-deeds whenever they are called 
for. That knowledge may be small in appearance, 
but, remember, the knowledge required for life is 
really very small. 

We learn, no doubt, a great many things, but what 
we are able to digest, what is converted in succum et 
sanguinem, into our very life-blood, and gives us 



PROFESSOR MAX MULLER 121 

strength and fitness for practical life, is by no means 
so much as we imagine in our youth. There are 
certain things which we must know, as if they were 
part of ourselves. But there are many other things 
which we simply put into our pockets, which we can 
find there whenever we want them, but which 
we do not know as we must know, for instance, the 
grammar of a language. It is well to remember this 
distinction between what we know intuitively, and 
what we know by a certain effort of memory only, for 
our success in life depends greatly on this distinction 
— on our knowing what we know, and knowing what 
we do not know, but what nevertheless we can find, if 
wanted. 

It has often been said that we only know 
thoroughly what we can teach, and it is equally true 
that we can only teach what we know thoroughly. I 
therefore congratulate this Society for the Extension of 
University teaching, that they have tried to draw their 
teachers from the great Universities of England, and 
that they have endeavoured, to engage the services of 
a large number of teachers, so that every single 
teacher may teach one subject only, his own subject, 
his special subject, his hobby, if you like — anyhow, a 
subject in which he feels perfectly at home, because he 
knows its history from beginning to end. The Univer- 
sities can afford to foster that race of special students, 
but the country at large ought to be able to command 
their services. If this Society can bring this about, if 
it can help to distribute the accumulated but often 
stagnant knowledge of University professors and tutors 
over the thirsty land, it will benefit not the learners 
only, but the teachers also. It will impart new life 



122 UNIVERSITY EXTENSION ADDRESSES 

to the Universities, for nothing is so inspiriting to 
a teacher as an eager class of students, — not students 
who wish to be drilled for an examination, but 
students who wish to be guided and encouraged in 
acquiring real knowledge. And nothing is so delight- 
ful for students as to listen to a teacher whose whole 
heart is in his subject. Learning ought to be joy and 
gladness, not worry and weariness. When I saw the 
eagerness and real rapture with which our visitors at 
Oxford last summer listened to the lectures provided 
for them, I said to myself, This is what a University 
ought to be. It is what, if we may trust old 
chronicles, Universities were in the beginning, and 
what they may be once more if this movement, so 
boldly inaugurated by the Universities of Cambridge, 
Oxford, and London, and so wisely guided by Mr. 
Goschen and his fellow-workers, becomes what we all 
hope it may become, a real and lasting success. 



THE APPLICATION OF THE HISTOEICAL 
METHOD TO ECONOMIC SCIENCE 

yf By His Grace the Duke of Argyll, K.G. 

&,.. ig9o ^U^^briff, 

The subject on which I have to address you to-day 
is one so very large, so immensely wide, viz. — the 
connection between history and economic science — 
that I must say a few words in explanation of the 
very limited aspect in which alone it is possible to 
regard it in a single address, and for this purpose I 
wish to remind you of a few facts, not always, perhaps, 
borne in mind. It is now, my Lord Mayor, little 
more than a hundred years — I think exactly one 
hundred and fourteen years — since my illustrious 
countryman, Adam Smith, published the Wealth of 
Nations. During that hundred years, at least fifty 
years of it was an uphill contest, as you know, 
between the doctrines of economic science and the 
long -established practice of this and of all other 
countries. It was not, I think it may be said, until 
the year 1847 that the doctrines of free trade — or 
free exchange, as perhaps it ought properly to be 
called, which were taught and inculcated by Adam 



124 UNIVERSITY EXTENSION ADDRESSES 

Smith — secured a practical triumph at the time of 
the potato failure and the abolition of the Corn Laws 
by Sir Eobert Peel. Since that period the doctrines 
of free trade have been promulgated and defended 
by a series of eminent writers. Those writers, my 
Lord Mayor, like all other writers of that class, have 
established for themselves a great authority, and have 
built up a great body of doctrine quite apart from the 
question of free trade. In dealing with that single 
question of free trade, they have incidentally treated 
much larger questions connected with economic 
science, and their authority derived from their 
advocacy of free trade has extended to all the other 
doctrines which, in the course of controversy, they 
came to promulgate or defend. 

Now, it always happens under such circumstances 
that a body of men acquiring an authority of this 
kind are very apt to carry that authority into 
doctrines which are not as sound as those with which 
they were principally charged. The consequence is 
that, during the last few years, there have arisen a 
great number of writers — I should say within the last 
twenty years — who have found great fault with the 
conclusions of those older authors, and who have 
published most interesting works, inveighing, in some 
cases, in strong language against their doctrines. 
When I speak of the great economic writers of the 
last hundred years, you know very well the principal 
names and persons to whom I refer. Adam Smith 
stands almost alone. Hardly anybody attacks him, 
because he had a great practical object in view, and 
although in promoting that object he may have said a 
few things which were not correct, and promulgated a 



DUKE OF ARGYLL 125 

few abstract opinions which will not stand investi- 
gation, yet the simplicity of his work — its great 
influence and great success — has earned for him a 
reputation in which he stands absolutely alone. But 
the writers that have followed him are such as these. 
First of all there was James Mill, then there was 
David Eicardo (a great authority, especially in 
London), then there was the better known son of 
James Mill — John Stuart Mill — who lived on, as you 
know, to our own time, and died not many years ago. 
In much later years there was — not so much as an 
original investigator as a systematiser and teacher — 
our late friend, Professor Fawcett. These great 
names constitute a sort of apostolic succession in 
the authority of economic science. They are often 
spoken of now as " the orthodox Economists." The 
writers who have sprung up within the last ten or 
twenty years are, some of them, much less generally 
known. They cannot be said to form a school, for 
they differ widely from each other, but they are, many 
of them, very able men. It so happens that, about 
thirty or forty years ago, I read, I think, as much 
political economy as is good for any human being to 
read. I had become a confirmed free trader, and I 
swallowed much of the other doctrines of the school 
without much criticism and without much resistance. 
Occasionally, in reading them, I could not help seeing 
that there were some things said which did not appear 
to be well founded in observation or experience, and 
there were occasionally things which were ambiguous 
or obscure. But it is a laborious work to investigate 
these questions of abstract thought, and I accepted 
them upon authority. About three or four years ago 



126 UNIVERSITY EXTENSION ADDRESSES 

it happened to me to see a very elaborate theory, 
which I perceived clearly to be quite erroneous, pro- 
pounded and defended by quotations from some of 
these writers. This induced me to look back into 
some of these old obiter dicta which had caught my 
passing attention in former years, and I soon found by 
the application of the ordinary processes of verbal 
analysis — which I recommend strongly to all young 
men and young women who desire to know the truth 
— I found by a little close attention and verbal 
analysis that some of the obiter dicta of these great 
writers were obvious fallacies, — at least, such they 
seemed to me. I only wish to refer to the general 
fact. This, again, induced me to look more closely 
into the younger school of political economy, and 
there I was surprised to find my views of the 
erroneousness of many of those doctrines strongly 
supported by a great number of younger men who 
have arisen since the death of John Stuart Mill. 

I will mention some of the authors to whom I refer. 
It is quite natural, I must say, and we need not be 
surprised that in such a complicated and enormous 
subject as economic science, when new questions arise 
they should be viewed from a new point of view, and 
that errors should be discovered in the abstract 
doctrines of the older writers. The later writers to 
whom I particularly refer — I will name four or five to 
show how representative they are — are such as Professor 
Jevons (of the University of London), Professor Thorold 
Eogers (of the University of Oxford), Professor Nicol- 
son (of the University of Edinburgh), and last but not 
least, the distinguished author of the article in the 
last edition of the Encyclopaedia Britannica on 



DUKE OF ARGYLL 127 

" Political Economy," Mr. Ingram, of Dublin. So you 
thus have eminent men from London, Oxford, Edin- 
burgh, and Dublin all engaged in assailing many of 
the dogmas and dicta which had fallen from the older 
writers. Time would fail me to quote more than a 
very few sentences, but I want to show you how very 
strong indeed the language of this younger school is 
in regard to the fallacies taught by the older school. 
Take Professor Jevons, connected eminently with the 
University of London. Professor Jevons not merely 
dissents, but he is vehement in his denunciations of 
many of the old writers. He says : " The only hope 
of attaining a true system of economics is to fling 
aside, once and for ever, the mazy and preposterous 
assumptions of the Eicardian school." Again he says : 
" Our English economists have been living in a fools' 
paradise." Again, " That able but wrong-headed man, 
Dr. Eicardo, shunted the car of economic science on to 
the wrong line, a line along which it was further urged 
towards confusion by his equally able and wrong-headed 
admirer, John Stuart Mill." Once more, he says, " It 
will be a work of labour to pick up the fragments of a 
shattered science and to start anew ; but it is a work 
from which they must not shrink who wish to see any 
advance in economic science." I think these quotations 
are quite sufficient to show you I am not speaking 
without book when I say that the older writers have 
been in recent years assailed by eminent men, and 
assailed in language which means the most emphatic 
denunciation of many of their fundamental doctrines. 
I do not mean to say that there is any very definite 
school of teaching represented by these men. Some 
of them attack one doctrine, some another. They are 



128 UNIVERSITY EXTENSION ADDRESSES 

not all of them united in what they would substitute 
for the abandoned doctrines, but they are all agreed 
that the older writers, on many subjects, fell into the 
most serious errors. Then they say, " Whence came 
all these errors ? " The common explanation is that 
the " method " of the orthodox economists was a wrong 
one — that it was a method fallacious because it was 
" too abstract " ; that Eicardo, James Mill, John Stuart 
Mill, and all the rest, were "too abstract" in their 
treatment of the science. Let me say at once that I 
do not agree that this is the source of error, if error 
there has been. Pray let us remember that abstract 
ideas are the meat and drink of our daily life. It is 
not merely that all science is founded on abstract 
ideas ; it is that in all the transactions of common life 
we deal, every day and every moment of our lives, 
with purely abstract ideas. Justice and injustice, truth 
and untruth, error and unbelief — all these words, and 
a thousand more, are representative of purely abstract 
ideas, and we do not go materially wrong in using 
these abstract terms as expressive of our abstract ideas. 
I do not believe that this, by itself, was a source of 
error at all. In economic science we have to deal in 
like manner with abstract terms — with wealth, with 
value, with wages, with labour, with capital, with 
instruments of production, and with phrases such as 
these. Well, these are abstract terms, and it is quite 
true, in my opinion, that the older writers, in dealing 
with these fundamental conceptions of economic science, 
have been full of errors. But the cause lay not in the 
fact that their ideas were abstract, but that they were 
bad abstracts — that their analysis of facts has been 
bad and incomplete. As has been said by Adam 



DUKE OF ARGYLL 129 

Smith himself — this is one of the few quotations with 
which I will trouble you, — " Gross sophistry has scarce 
ever had any influence upon the opinions of mankind 
except in matters of speculation and philosophy, and in 
these it has frequently had the greatest ; mere sophisms 
which had no other foundation but inaccuracy and 
ambiguity of common language." That is a strong 
expression from Adam Smith, but it fully explains the 
errors found in the older school. Before I pass from 
this question whether the method has erred in being 
too abstract, let me repeat that it is not from being too 
abstract, but from making bad abstracts, that errors 
have arisen. If you make a bad abstract of compli- 
cated facts — if you make an incomplete analysis of 
any substance in chemistry, you have a wrong result. 
And so you will find that the error of these old writers 
is not that they have been too abstract, but that they 
have constantly forgotten certain all-important elements 
in their consideration of the questions they had in 
hand. In dealing with wealth and wages, and all 
these abstract terms, they have forgotten many elements 
in the consideration, and that has been due to the 
enormous complication of the elements with which we 
have to deal in all these subjects. The younger school 
say, " Let us have a new method. There has been 
something wrong with the old methods ; these errors 
could not have arisen with a good method." It is now 
a very common thing to say, "Let us go in for history." 
Let us take the " historical method," and so that is the 
subject about which I propose to address you to-night. 
The suggestion is that all the difficulties of economic 
science will be solved, and all the errors refuted by 
reading history. I wish to say very shortly that I 

K 



130 UNIVERSITY EXTENSION ADDRESSES 

entirely agree in the importance of history as helping 
us to the solution of the great problems of economic 
science. Yes ! but history on one condition. You 
will never solve these problems if you do not apply 
to the facts of history the same powers of careful 
classification and analysis which are absolutely 
required in interpreting the phenomena of your own 
day. Do not suppose that by a careless reading of 
history you can solve any of these problems. You 
require just as much in the days gone by as in the 
days in which you are now living — not merely to 
collect facts, but to collate them and concentrate them 
in the light of thought ; just as scientific men have 
made all their discoveries by looking at the facts of 
Nature, not in a haphazard way, but in the light of 
genius, and in the light, very often, of some pre- 
conception which may possibly have been in itself 
erroneous — just as they have made those discoveries 
by looking at external Nature through the faculties of 
reasoning, ay, and of imagination, too ; so, if you are 
to profit by history, you must read history in the spirit 
of careful analysis, of weighing and comparing the 
facts as well as ascertaining them. You know where 
it is said, " The kingdom of Heaven is within you." 
Yes, ladies and gentlemen, and the kingdom of Nature 
is within us, too. Professor Jevons says the ultimate 
laws of political economy are " known to us instinct- 
ively by intuition." This is not, I think, literally 
true. It is much too broadly stated. But at all 
events, the elements of political economy are there. 
You have to deal with the phenomena of society, and 
society is made of individuals ; and it is in the analysis 
of your own thoughts and of your own instincts that 



DUKE OF ARGYLL 131 

you will best find the ultimate solution of the diffi- 
culties which assail you both in the history of the 
past and in the complicated transactions of your own 
life. If we cannot analyse the present we shall not 
be able to analyse the past. Therefore, let me give 
you warning, that when you come to history you must 
study it with all the care with which you study 
existing facts. But there is one great advantage in 
history, and that is this, that in regard to many of the 
facts of your existing life you get rid of what is 
temporary, accidental ; you see human life in other 
conditions than those with which you are yourself 
familiar — sometimes so widely different, that the whole 
world seems to have been other than it is to you. That, 
no doubt, is an advantage, a great advantage, if you take 
due care of it ; but observe, your business in correcting 
past errors of economic science will not be in being- 
less abstract, but in making better abstracts, both for 
the present and for the future. 

And now let me give also a few words of warning 
as to the difficulties of dealing with history, with a 
view to the solution of economic problems. In the 
first place you must remember this : that history, 
properly so called, carries you a very short way back in 
the account of human society. All history is lost, and 
lost very soon indeed, in the prehistoric. We know 
nothing of the first beginnings of anything, unless — 
of course, I am not speaking of that — unless we 
accept the Biblical narrative of Creation. But I am 
talking about it now as a matter of science, and I 
must remind you that from history, properly so called 
— that is to say, from contemporary historic records — 
we know nothing of the origin of human society. We 



132 UNIVERSITY EXTENSION ADDRESSES 

may dislike to look that fact in the face, and many of 
us so dislike it that we forget it altogether, and put it 
out of sight. But it is a fact that we know nothing in 
the light of history of the origin of human society. 
Man has kept no journal of his own early days. We 
must trust to other authorities for anything we can 
know of that. This is not an insignificant fact, for 
pray remember, ladies and gentlemen, that the most 
important problems of social science find their ultimate 
difficulty in determining what has been the origin of 
man. Has man arisen from a single pair ? Is it so, 
or is it not ? Having had some personal acquaintance 
with Charles Darwin, I wrote to him some years ago, 
— and no man ever applied to Charles Darwin without 
having a candid and truthful reply, so far as his 
knowledge carried him — I wrote to him and said : 
" My dear Mr. Darwin, — In your theory you assume 
that man originated at some one place, and in a single 
pair. Will you be kind enough to tell me on what 
you base that assumption, assuming that you do not 
accept the Biblical account as in itself conclusive ? " 
He wrote back to say : " I have no other ground for 
assuming it " (he did assume it), " but the doctrine of 
chances, for it is inconceivable to me that so 
highly-organised a being as man could have arisen 
except in one spot and from one pair." I do not 
now raise any question whether his reasoning is 
safe or not. I only wish to point out that in this 
matter the speculations of Darwin and the authority 
of Moses are at one. Man began with a single pair. 
That fact being admitted, let us look at the light 
it casts on one of the great problems of economic 
science. People talk about "instruments of produc- 



DUKE OF ARGYLL 133 

tion," and some modern theorists say that the instru- 
ments of production ought to belong to society. 
What instruments of production were there when man 
consisted of one or two or three families ? The whole 
of the instruments of production were once in the head 
and in the brain and in the heart and in the hands of 
one man and of his family. The whole of the instru- 
ments of production were their personal property. 
Does this cast no light upon the nature of human 
society ? Is it not true now, as in the days of Adam, 
that the ultimate instruments of production in all 
human industry *are the human head, the human heart, 
and the human hands ; and does not the theory which 
asserts that all the instruments of production should 
be placed in the hands of what men call society come 
to this — the doctrine, the horrible doctrine of negro 
slavery in America some thirty years ago — that man 
was made to be the property of his neighbour ? Does 
not this follow inevitably, if that fact be admitted, 
that all the original instruments of production belong 
to the individual man, the individual brain, the 
individual hand, and the human spirit ? Well, then, 
let us remember another thing. Talk of solving the 
difficulties of human society by history. Do you 
remember what are the things that are prehistoric ? 
The invention of language — if I may use the word 
invention — the origin of language, the origin of writ- 
ing, the origin of artificial fire, the origin of domestic 
animals, the origin of the cereal grasses — all these things 
are hid in the night of the prehistoric. History casts 
no light whatever on the origin of language. Why, 
gentlemen, the philosophers of language can give us 
nothing but a series of childish and almost grotesque 



134 UNIVERSITY EXTENSION ADDRESSES 

suggestions. We know nothing ; it came down from 
heaven and from the instincts with which heaven 
invested our species ; and amongst the first and 
greatest was the faculty of conceiving abstract 
ideas, and giving to those ideas a habitation and a 
name. 

Now, looking back to history properly so-called, 
leaving the prehistoric in the obscurity from which 
we cannot lift it, it seems to me there are three 
great facts which are of great interest in economic 
science. First of all, that there has been great 
progress in our command over the resources of 
Nature, our own nature being included in the term. 
The second is, that this progress has not been 
continuous, but has been very fitful; and the third 
is, that it has been locally often retrogressive. 
Human society has sometimes gone backward as well 
as forward. The question naturally arises here : Is it 
true that there are any laws of birth, growth, and 
death in nations as there are in individuals ? That 
is a question not very, often put, and I have never 
seen it grappled with or handled. I was, however, 
much surprised the other day to get a book on 
political economy from America, a country which has 
now developed a very powerful school of economic 
science, owing to the contest going on on our old 
subject of free trade — I was very much surprised to 
get a book from America which assumed, as an 
unquestionable fact, that among nations, as among 
individuals, there is a law of birth, of growth, of 
maturity, and of death. I was very much surprised 
to see that in ,an American book, because America is 
a young society. It is full of life, full of its own 



DUKE OF ARGYLL 135 

conscious energy — and I might almost apply to it the 
famous lines of Wordsworth : — 



A simple child 

That lightly draws its breath, 

And feels its life in every limb ; 
"What should it know of death ? 

And yet this writer in America, looking at the history 
of the world, sees distinctly that there is a law of 
birth, of growth, of maturity, and of decay in 
nations. Now there is no question whatever of 
this, that a great part of the world — some of the most 
interesting parts of the world — are covered with 
the ruins of ancient civilisations which have passed 
away. This is unquestionable. We may make of that 
fact what we like. We may say that the causes of 
their decay are no longer causes in operation; but 
when we come nearer our own time we see that even 
in Europe the relative positions of the nations has 
greatly altered since comparatively recent times. It 
would be invidious if I were to mention names, but it 
will recur to all of you that there are nations now in 
Europe which no longer occupy the place they did 
occupy in the scale of nations even a century — and 
still more clearly a few centuries — ago; and it is 
quite possible that such changes may be owing to 
those laws of decay which the American writer says 
prevail over the whole world. But what I would 
wish to point out to you is this : that as when we 
stand on the sea-shore we are often unable to say 
whether the ripples of the tide are advancing or 
receding, so it is very difficult for us to decide whether 
any given nation is waxing or waning. But if there 
is even a doubt on this point, it should make us pause 



136 UNIVERSITY EXTENSION ADDRESSES 

and think, because many writers of our time assume 
that all movement is not only progress, but progress 
in the right direction. Now I do not profess 
to have not made up my mind whether there is 
any law by which modern nations pass through the 
periods of birth, decay, and death ; but I am sufficiently 
doubtful to look with great circumspection on all 
movements, and to test them whether they are really 
movements of progress by other considerations than 
the mere fact that they are movements of some kind 
or another. And this, I think, is a most necessary 
caution. 

There is one other universal fact connected with 
past history, to which, for a few minutes, I wish to 
attract your attention, and it is this : that man, ever 
since we have any record of him, has been a fighting 
animal. Let not my fair friends, whom I have the 
honour to address, think I am bringing before them 
something which belongs to a coarse philosophy. Let 
us look facts in the face. In all science we have to 
deal with facts, and we ought not to put them aside 
for the sake of fancy or sentiment. It is unquestion- 
ably true that war and conquest have been universal 
facts in the history of the world. I believe I am 
correct in saying that there is not a single nation of 
any power now existing in the world that has not 
been founded in war and conquest. We are apt to 
forget this, because here in England, and over the 
whole of the British Isles, we are the descendants both 
of the conquerors and of the conquered ; but we ought 
to remember that the earliest conquering race we 
know of in Britain was that with which I have myself 
the honour to be connected, I believe, by a continuous 



DUKE OF ARGYLL 137 

descent, and that is the Celts. The Celtic invaders 
of Britain unquestionably found there an aboriginal 
population. They did not come into an empty country. 
They seized Britain when it had been already occupied 
by some older race, of which we know nothing except 
from a few palaeolithic implements found in the 
mounds and caves of the country ; and they founded 
this nation on war and conquest, reducing that early 
race to the conditions of slavery. So it has been all 
over the world, and it is so at the present moment. 
We are even now perpetually seizing and occupying 
countries which have a native population, and whom 
we do not actually conquer only because they are too 
weak to fight. The world in this respect has not 
changed, ladies and gentlemen, — not one whit. I know 
nothing more curious in recent history than the fact 
that, in the great war between Germany and France, 
when France was defeated, Germany seized a little 
bit of her territory — Alsace, and she was severely 
blamed for doing so. I said to all my friends at that 
time, "Do you think the world has so completely 
changed : that great wars and great conquests are to 
go on, and that the conquering nation is never to take 
what all other nations have hitherto taken — portions 
of territory for their own possession ? " There was 
no answer to that. But at the same time it does 
show a very curious change in public sentiment, if it 
be really expected that there may be great wars and 
conquests without annexation and possession. My 
own belief is that there is much of the same kind 
yet before us. At all events, in the general history of 
the world, the fact has been that all great countries 
have been founded by invasion, by conquest, and on 



138 UNIVERSITY EXTENSION ADDRESSES 

permanent military possession. I do not think it 
looks very much as if this universal fact of humanity 
is one that is going to cease. What is the state of 
Europe now? I believe there are four great military 
monarchies with certainly not less than between six 
and eight millions of men under arms, besides a very 
large number that might be called out of the reserves. 
I am speaking in the presence of my Right Honourable 
friend the Chancellor of the Exchequer, and he must 
know, as we all know, that he is obliged to put his 
hand into our pockets for a very large sum of money 
to support a comparatively small army. It is well to 
look this fact in the face, and I believe you will find 
it full of instruction in an economic point of view. 
There are many aspects in which we may regard war ; 
there are three especially. There is the terror and 
the suffering of war; there is the triumph and the 
glory of war ; and, lastly, there are the blessings and 
the benefits which have been secured by war. Now, 
we have very eloquent expressions in various authors 
upon all these aspects of war. I will mention three 
of them to you. You know those magnificent words 
— they are familiar to all of us : " Every battle of the 
warrior is with confused noise and garments rolled in 
blood." That is a picture, and a powerful picture, of 
the terror and the suffering of war. Well, then, on 
the triumph of war we have the lines — I think the 
too bitter lines — addressed by Lord Byron to Napoleon, 
after his fall, in which he said, — 

The triumph and the vanity, the rapture and the strife, 
The earthquake voice of victory ! To thee the breath of life. 

There is the feeling of triumph ; and now let me read 



DUKE OF ARGYLL 139 

to you a few lines, very striking, I think, as coming 
from a Quaker poet — for you know it is a doctrine of 
the Quakers that war is almost in all cases unlawful, 
yet Whittier, the great American poet, who is a 
member of the Society of Friends, has lived to see the 
blessings which only war could confer upon the world, 
and he says, speaking of " Nature," — 

She knows the seed lies safe below 

The fires that blast and burn, 
For all the tears of blood we sow, 

She waits the rich return. 

She sees with clearer eyes than ours 

The good of suffering born, 
The hearts that blossom like her flowers, 

And ripen like her corn. 

"Well, what are the blessings of war ? Is it not a 
universal feeling, the popularity of soldiers ? Never 
shall I forget the scene which I saw in this city when 
Garibaldi came to it after he had secured the inde- 
pendence of Italy. There is only one other scene in 
my memory to compare to it — very different as it was 
in many of its conditions — and that was the scene 
close to us which surrounded the coffin of the Duke 
of Wellington as it sank under the pavement of St. 
Paul's. Now, why is this popular admiration, almost 
worship, given to soldiers — to great soldiers ? Well, 
there are many reasons ; but depend upon it, it is not 
this — it is not mere animal courage that you admire. 
Animal courage is the commonest of all virtues in the 
lowest men and in the lowest animals. It is not this 
that you admire in soldiers ; it is the feeling that in a 
great soldier — in a really great soldier — you have a 



140 UNIVERSITY EXTENSION ADDRESSES 

representative, an embodiment of the very highest 
human gifts. No man has been a great soldier with- 
out having the very highest human gifts in the furniture 
of his mind. The magnetic influence of man over 
man — that is what we see and what we admire. War 
brings forth kingly men, and we see in them the 
emblems of the foundation of all human society, and 
of all human possessions. 

But there is another essential which belongs to 
war, not one of mere sentiment, and one which is 
immediately connected with our science ; and that is, 
that to war, as I have already said, all countries owe 
the possession of all that they enjoy. Now, here we 
come upon a very curious feature of economic science. 
I took the trouble some two or three years ago to look 
out all the definitions of wealth which could be found 
in the older economists, and strange to say, I found 
one element entirely and absolutely wanting. I do 
not mean to say that if you had asked those writers, 
" Don't you mean to include ' possession ' in wealth," 
they would not say, " Yes, of course " ; but it is exactly 
those elements of which men say, " Of course," that 
they forget, and they do not put into their definitions. 
There are plenty of definitions of the things you must 
possess to have wealth, but the idea of possession as 
in itself a necessary element in the very idea of 
wealth is rarely thought of. I know only one perfect 
definition of wealth, and that is in the New Testa- 
ment. In a few words, it is perfect : " A man's life 
consisteth not in the abundance of the things which 
he possesseth." The whole sentence falls upon the 
word "possesseth." Possession is the foundation, the 
necessary condition, of all wealth ; and that is why 



DUKE OF ARGYLL 141 

you admire the soldier ! That is the inner source of 
the human instinct which has been planted in you by 
the great Creator. You are translating into your own 
inmost thoughts the facts of nature and the funda- 
mental conditions of all human society when you 
admire the successful soldier as the emblem of that on 
which, originally, all your civilisation has been founded. 
But here again, ladies and gentlemen, I wish to point 
out to you that we are met with great difficulties. 
War, undoubtedly, has been the source of all our 
wealth. There is no doubt about it. It is a question 
of historical fact which no man can dispute ; but there 
are many conditions under which war has been a 
great curse to mankind, and the definition I should 
give of all war which is useless and injurious is this 
— war that is not for possession, but for some other 
object — mere lust of conquest, pride, devotion to 
barbarous and savage deities, and all other causes 
which lead men to make war into a pursuit by itself 
without reference to its objects. Now, we have a very 
curious illustration of this, which has often struck me 
very much in the history of mediaeval Europe. As 
we know the Eoman Empire was a great military 
empire. In the height of its glory, property was 
secured, civilisation and industry — such industry as 
existed in those days — were secured, because there 
was a great empire to defend it, and to enforce the 
recognised obligations and duties of mankind. But 
when the Boman Empire broke up, and semi-barbarous 
tribes took possession of Europe, then there arose war 
of another kind, and under new conditions. There 
was no great empire — nothing but inter-tribal wars, 
and inter- tribal wars do not give security — permanent 



142 UNIVERSITY EXTENSION ADDRESSES 

security — for the growth of wealth. There was a very 
curious result of this. We have very tolerable accounts 
of the state of agriculture in this country at the close 
of the Eoman Empire and in the first centuries of the 
Christian era. It is a curious fact, but I will venture 
to assert it on evidence I have carefully examined, that 
I believe there was no progress in agriculture, and, of 
course, no progress in wealth, for nearly eleven hundred 
years from the close of the Eoman Empire till the dawn 
of improvement in our own grandfathers' time. The 
agriculture of Scotland, for example, was, during those 
long centuries, in a retrograde condition. Why was this ? 
Because there was perpetual war — war between tribes, 
not between great nations, but between tribes fighting 
each other across glen, or mountain, or river ; and in 
the perpetual feuds of families, which lasted for 
centuries — they invaded each other's territory, murder- 
ing each other's people, carrying off each other's cattle, 
or burning each other's houses. War did not give 
what it ought to give, secure possession. Look at the 
effect of that on political economy. I daresay many 
of you have not realised the fact that the whole of 
Europe was, up to very recent times, and a great part 
of Europe even now is, inhabited by men living in 
villages called village communities. There is a great 
deal of modern sentiment got up in favour of village 
communities, and against individual property. Why 
did they live in these villages? Because they were 
obliged to defend each other. They could not live in 
single houses or scattered farms, and preserve their 
crops or cattle ; they must live in communities, and 
under the protection of military chiefs. Now it is a 
very curious fact that these village communities are at 



DUKE OF ARGYLL 143 

last being rapidly dissolved even in Eussia, and in the 
eastern parts of Europe where they still exist, through 
the natural economic forces of our own age, — the rail- 
road and the steamboat doing a great deal more than 
armies or parliaments could do. The young women 
of these villages, seeing railways and the possibility of 
getting fine dresses in the great centres of civilisation, 
go into the towns and get higher wages. The young 
men are under similar inducements. So gradually 
those villages are being given up. They were the 
result of bad and insecure conditions which kept back 
the civilisation of Europe more than a thousand years, 
and now they are gradually giving way. 

There was another effect of these village com- 
munities with regard to improvements, and that 
was the influence of custom. You have no idea how 
impossible it is to get people living in a village system 
like that to adopt or believe in anything new. They 
walk, as it were, in the ruts of custom, and their 
system is such that any individual member of their 
community introducing a new system commits an 
injury on his neighbours. Unless they have divisions, 
they cannot have good crops nor improved breeds of 
stock. But dividing and enclosing is one of the 
greatest crimes and sins against the community. The 
result is that the whole community is kept down to 
the very lowest level of the stupidest customs of 
ancient times. The other day a very interesting 
speech was made by the Archbishop of Odessa to the 
Eussians in that city. He sees numbers of poor Germans 
going in and buying lands to a great extent in the 
southern parts of Eussia, and they were all thriving 
on the individual system, each having his own crop 



144 UNIVERSITY EXTENSION ADDRESSES 

and owning his own farm. The old Eussian system 
is giving way, and the Archbishop says to the Eussians, 
" Go and look at the German villages ; see how nice 
and clean and tidy and prosperous they are, and com- 
pare them with your own dirty houses and slovenly 
agriculture." Yes; but the Archbishop forgot that 
these poor men could not improve. Until the village 
system is broken up, the individual mind of man is 
never brought into contact with the fertility of the 
soil and the resources of modern civilisation. Another 
very important feature in illustration of what the 
instincts of man point to, with regard to individual 
property in land, is to be seen in our colonies. You 
know our colonies have enormous quantities of land 
to dispose of. Not at all from theory of any kind or 
sort, but simply from the instincts of these communities, 
the first thing they do is to advertise to the whole 
world that their land is to be sold in individual plots. 
I saw this very morning in the papers a statement, 
that our various colonies had within a limited number 
of recent years sold to individuals some ninety million 
acres. There is a colony in Western Australia, 
numbering little more than forty thousand people, who 
have demanded from our Government here — and I 
believe it has been conceded — that they shall have the 
exclusive right of disposing of territory larger than the 
whole of Europe. What do these colonies invariably 
do? When they get the lands, they immediately 
advertise their readiness to sell them or let them to 
individual men, each purchaser resting, of course, upon 
the security that has been obtained through their 
connection with our great military Empire. Our 
colonists know instinctively that the individual mind 



DUKE OF ARGYLL 145 

must be brought into contact with the soil and with 
modern means of improvement. Let me illustrate this 
by a very * curious case, which attracted my attention 
a very short time ago. You know, probably, that 
there is a Society in this country for the exploration 
of the Holy Land ; it is called the Palestine Explora- 
tion Society. I earnestly recommend the publications 
of that Society to the consideration and attention of 
all young men and women who wish to know the 
bearings of history bn some of the many aspects of 
economic science. The result of the operations of 
that Society is this, that the whole country between 
the Mediterranean and the Euphrates is being completely 
and scientifically examined by men of the highest 
education as historians and engineers. Well, I hope 
you will remember what that country is : it is a narrow 
strip of the world ; it seems a mere fragment of the 
terrestrial surface ; but it is by "far the most interesting 
historical area on the surface of our planet. A narrow 
margin of territory of some five or six hundred miles 
between the Mediterranean and the Euphrates is the 
seat of the greatest and most ancient civilisations of 
the world. They are all now in absolute desolation. 
Great mounds cover the site of Babylon and the site 
of Mneveh ; and nearer to our own Holy Land, in 
Bashan and the east of the Jordan, a country rich in 
natural resources, and so late as the Boman Empire 
full of populous cities, is all now nearly absolutely 
desolate ! Why ? We cannot help asking ourselves, 
Why have these countries become desolate ? Is it in 
virtue of a law of death operating among all nations, 
or can we trace special causes ? Yes ; we can trace 
the causes. I have spoken of the blessings of war; 

L 



146 UNIVERSITY EXTENSION ADDRESSES 

I have spoken of the triumphs of war ; I have spoken 
of the poetry of war ; but go to these countries and 
see the curse of war. There can be no doubt what- 
ever that these countries have been desolated by a 
cruel and a wicked passion for war, wholly independent 
of the purposes of possession, which are legitimate 
objects and purposes of war. We have recovered, in 
our time, written on enduring monuments of stone, the 
inscriptions of the great monarchs of Babylon and of 
Assyria setting forth the methods by which they con- 
ducted war. We find in them a perfect confirmation 
of all that is told us by the Jewish writers of the 
cruelties and desolation which they inflicted. Allow 
me to read to you two inscriptions which I have copied 
for the purpose, to show you what was the nature of 
war as conducted by those great monarchies. We 
have inscriptions extending over many hundred years, 
and there are two especially of two monarchs who 
are mentioned in the book of Kings, and other books 
of the Old Testament. Tigleth Pilesar I. (b.c. 1130 
circ.) says : " The country of Kasizara I passed through. 
With their 20,000 men and their five kings I engaged. 
I defeated them. Their carcases covered the valleys. 
I cut off their heads ; of the battlements of their cities 
I made heaps like mounds of earth ; their movables, 
their wealth, and their valuables I plundered to a 
countless amount. Six thousand of their warriors, who 
fled before my servants and accepted my yoke, I took 
and gave over to the men of my own territory as 
slaves." Nearly four hundred years later we have 
Tigleth Pilesar II. repeating even more savagely the 
same savage boasts : " The City of Amilatu I captured, 
the people and children I carried off. Bitschalli, 



DUKE OF AKGYLL 147 

through its extent like a whirlwind I overspread. 1 laid 
waste its districts. The groves of palms I cut down, 
I did not leave one. Its forests I threw down. Its 
enclosures I threw down." There we have, together 
with later devastations down to the Saracenic, the 
whole secret of the desolation of those countries. War 
with these monarchies was a passion, a lust of blood, 
no doubt under the impulse of superstitious ideas with 
regard to that which pleased their bloody gods. Now 
turn to the language and read it with a new eye, and 
listen to it with a new ear — turn to the magnificent 
denunciations of the prophets of Israel against the 
wickedness of those days. Here is an instance — I 
think, perhaps, the most awful denunciation in the 
whole compass of the Old Testament. The infernal 
regions are represented as in haste to swallow up those 
cruel and wicked monarchies. " Hell from beneath 
is moved for thee to meet thee at thy coming, . . . 
Thy pomp is brought down to the grave, and the noise 
of thy viols : the worm is spread under thee, and the 
worms cover thee. . . . They that see thee shall narrowly 
look upon thee, and consider thee, saying, Is this the 
man that made the earth to tremble, that did shake 
kingdoms ; that made the world as a wilderness, and 
destroyed the cities thereof ? " This is the history 
of the desolation of that country. One monarch 
after another given up to the worship of false gods, 
caring for nothing but war and desolation for the mere 
lust of the eyes and the pride of life. Will these 
countries ever revive again ? The explorations of the 
Palestine Fund give us hope that they will. And 
how will they revive ? A German gentleman, an 
engineer, named Schumacher, went the other day 



148 UNIVERSITY EXTENSION ADDRESSES 

across the Jordan to find a city mentioned in the Old 
Testament — Abila — as coming in the way of one of 
these expeditions of Tigleth Pilesar, and in later ages 
as one of the cities of the Decapolis. He wanted to 
see if he could find the site indicated in the Old 
Testament book of Kings, and which it was well 
known was situated somewhere about fifteen or twenty 
miles to the east of the Sea of Tiberias. Mr. 
Schumacher went to the place and found an old Arab 
sheikh presiding over a village there. He told him 
that he had come to see ruins and antiquities. The 
Arabs always think you are going to seek for treasure. 
They never believe in historic interest, and are very 
shy about showing anything. However, at last, after 
a long conversation, the sheikh took Mr. Schumacher 
to a place which he found covered with the broken 
stones of magnificent ruins — -the site of a great city. 
The old sheikh took him to a height where he saw a 
great extent of fine arable land, fairly well cultivated, 
and apparently prosperous. The sheikh turned to him 
and said, " My son, look at all those fields, they are 
all mine ; but I have sowers (or tenants) and cul- 
tivators under me, and they pay to me one-fifth of the 
produce." There we have a picture of society beginning, 
and all the theories of Eicardo about the nature and 
origin of rent may be sent to the winds, not as too 
abstract, but as entirely fallacious when you read the 
simple narrative of that man's story. For how did 
these fields become his ? Why was it that his " sowers" 
owed and paid rent to him ? I will tell you. He 
was a poor Arab, not richer, apparently, than his 
neighbours, but he had in him — in his head — that 
power of commanding influence over other men which, 



DUKE OF ARGYLL 149 

as I have told you, constitutes the soldier. The nomad 
Arabs always hate the settled Arabs, and there is no 
possibility of cultivating land there because of the 
incursions of the nomadic tribes. This man said to a 
number of neighbours, " Why don't we all come to- 
gether ? I will lead you, and set up the standard. 
You follow me. Beat off these vagrant Arabs and we 
will have a bit of country for ourselves." They agreed ; 
they saw he was in his own little way a king of men, 
and they followed him, and after desperate encounters 
for several years they established their power, and now 
the vagrant Arabs dare not touch them. There you 
see society beginning — there is possession, the source of 
all wealth, once more established — beginning with the 
soldier, with war for the legitimate purpose of securing 
possession and founding, I hope, a civilisation which, 
when the Turkish Empire is no more, will fill again 
those lands with population and with culture. 

Before I sit down I have only one other considera- 
tion with which to trouble you. Pray remember, when 
talking of history, that we are enacting history in our 
own time. Everything is history except the fleeting 
moment of the present. It is history since you entered 
this room. It is history since you did your business 
on the Exchange to-day. Everything really belongs 
to the past that we can fully grasp or understand, 
and I ask you to think of the history which attaches 
to every day's transactions in this vast centre of civilisa- 
tion. Pray remember that London contains a popula- 
tion of, I suppose, now four millions of human souls — 
a population greater than that of many powerful states 
which have made great figures in history. I ask you 
now to remember one thing about it, and that is the 



150 UNIVERSITY EXTENSION ADDRESSES 

commissariat of London. You know that the Duke of 
Wellington used to say he knew very few officers who 
could take twenty thousand men into Hyde Park and 
bring them out again in good order. You know also that 
the commissariat of great armies is one of the most 
difficult things great commanders have to encounter, even 
when they have at command all the resources of the 
country in which they may be fighting. The com- 
missariat of a great army is a matter of extreme diffi- 
culty, requiring the highest powers of thought and 
organisation. But what is that to the commissariat 
of four millions of people, and how is this commissariat 
provided ? Let any of you go out in the early morning 
— some of us have done it from the Houses of Parlia- 
ment — when a summer morning is just breaking, and 
the streets of London seem almost deserted, the very 
houses seem asleep. Let us think of London as it 
was seen by Wordsworth, standing on Westminster 
Bridge, when he said — 

And all this mighty heart is lying still. 

Yes, yes ; but think of who are providing for you ; 
think of the millions of hands on all sides of the globe, 
from those who are hunting for furs in the Siberian 
wilds to those who are cultivating sugar in the torrid 
zone, and tea in China and India ; think of all the 
hands working for you, of all the ships ploughing the 
ocean for you, to bring your daily food to this vast 
city, and I would ask you one question — How is this 
done ? Who does it ? Is it your municipality ? 
'No ! my Lord Mayor ; not you, with all your council- 
lors, could do it for an hour. What is the tie — what 
is the connecting link — between this vast demand and 



DUKE OF ARGYLL 151 

this world-wide supply? Individual interest; each 
man working for himself and for his own family. 
Individual interest is the tie, and the only tie, which 
provides the enterprise, the capital, the skill, the 
knowledge, and everything else that feeds this mighty 
population. Is not that a great lesson in economic 
science ? Is it wonderful that the older economists 
thought of nothing but this : " Don't you interfere with 
these mighty automatic forces ; hands off ! Let them 
alone ! They will do it better than you by your 
interference ; " and hence the doctrine of laissez /aire. 
Now there is a reaction against laissez faire. Well, 
gentlemen, there are limits to laissez faire as well as to 
other things. We must never run away with an 
abstract idea without looking to its limitations. There 
are limitations to the beneficent operation of in- 
dividual interest. There are certain things which can 
only be done by the community : the maintenance of 
confidence and order by your police ; the protection of 
property by your armed forces ; — all these things can 
only be done by the community. In the city of 
Glasgow the municipality has brought water from the 
mountains at a great distance to supply the city. 
Such things as these very often can only be done by 
the community, and the great question of our day is 
this — whether there may not be other branches of 
economic operation which the community may bene- 
ficially undertake — whether there may not be evils 
creeping up from time to time which can only be dealt 
with by the higher will and higher conscience of a 
Christian community. That is one of the great ques- 
tions of our time. I recommend it to the young 
men and the young women of this generation as 



152 UNIVERSITY EXTENSION ADDRESSES 

one of the most difficult, as it may be one of the 
most fruitful of all the investigations in which they 
can engage. We must always remember this, that 
we have to deal with tendencies and dispositions 
in human nature which are corrupt. You cannot 
legislate for humanity on the supposition that it is 
virtuous, that its instincts are unperverted. No one 
asserts more strongly than John Stuart Mill the fact 
that human nature' is corrupt. We are too apt to 
think that this is a mere dogma for the pulpit, and to 
leave it to the clergyman. Alas ! it is an economic 
truth with the most tremendous economic consequences. 
John Stuart Mill said, " Most criminal actions are, to 
a being like man, not more unnatural than most 
virtues." If this be true, we have hard work to do in 
guiding human society through the constant dangers 
which beset it. In conclusion, let me entreat you 
not to think that economic science is what my old 
friend Carlyle called "the dismal science." It has 
been made dismal by bad methods. Economic science 
includes all the questions which affect our nature. 
Let us return to the old definition of wealth. Do you 
see what it is ? Look at the word and examine it, 
and you will see what wonderful power these two 
letters " th " have at the end of a word in the English 
language : strong, strength ; long, length ; weal, wealth. 
By means of these two letters you pass from the con- 
crete to the abstract. Look what the economists have 
done for you. They have degraded the word " wealth " 
into the possession of lumps of matter. They say that 
wealth must be something material. Well, the meaning 
of the word " weal " was once the same as in the word 
"commonweal." It is our business and duty not to 



DUKE OF ARGYLL 153 

look merely at material things, but it is part of our 
economic science, I maintain, to look at all that con- 
stitutes the weal of human society. You may ex- 
patiate, as you like, in all the fields of human thought 
that bear upon the. welfare of the human family, and 
do not let the economist tell you you are going out of 
your field and out of your science in so doing. It is 
all part of your science. Given that idea of it and 
you will find it wide enough to exercise the richest 
imagination and the acutest intellect. And remember 
this — you young men and young women who are 
studying these subjects — remember that you have to 
deal with facts, and with eternal laws, and that the 
best motto, alike for your method and for your hope, 
is in the noble line of Wordsworth — 

Painstaking thought, and truth its dear reward. 






IDEALS 

By the Bishop of Durham (Dr. Westcott) 
1891 



Many of us remember the splendid myth in which 
Plato connects the position of men in their earthly life 
with their experience in an earlier existence. There 
are, he says, festivals in heaven, when Zeus, followed by 
the divine hosts, goes forth to the outer boundary of 
the universe, and, during its revolution, gazes on the 
supramundane realms of absolute being. The spectacle 
is the food of the heavenly nature, and gods and 
heroes fill themselves with it to the full in serene 
and untroubled tranquillity. Other unembodiecl souls 
follow in the celestial train, struggling to share the 
life-giving vision. Some with grievous effort catch 
more or less transitory glimpses of righteousness and 
beauty and moral order, and so retain for another 
period their lofty state. Others, bafned and beaten 
down, fail to gain the glorious sight, and, falling to 
earth, are forthwith confined in mortal frames. But 
since they still remember something of the truth which 
they have formerly seen, they cannot on their first 
embodiment sink below the state of man, and their 



THE BISHOP OF DURHAM 155 

place among men is determined by the measure of 
their remembrance. He who has seen and remembered 
most is born a philosopher. He who has seen and 
remembers least is born a despot. 

Now, without discussing in detail the remarkable 
hierarchy of classes which Plato sketches between 
these extremes, or entering on any philosophical 
speculation, we can notice two central thoughts, 
two central truths, I will venture to call them, 
vividly expressed in this great picture. That which 
makes us men is the capacity for regarding the 
eternal. That which fixes our position in the scale 
of humanity is the energy of the eternal within 
and upon us, by which we are freed more or less from 
the dominion of material and selfish aims. Or, to 
express the teaching in popular language, man is a 
being who fashions ideals, and the worth of man 
in relation to his fellows depends upon the ideals 
which he cherishes. 

Man partly is and wholly hopes to be. 

I wish, then, to say a few words now, necessarily 
most fragmentary and imperfect, upon ideals re- 
garded in this aspect. I wish to show, if there 
is need to show it, that ideals are the very soul 
of life ; that the characteristic spirit of University 
teaching, which this Society desires to bring within the 
reach of all, tends to quicken, to sustain, to perfect the 
loftiest ideals ; that the circumstances of the time 
give peculiar importance to this aspect of the work of 
University Extension. 

Ideals are, I say, the soul of life. The simplest 
human act is directed to an end, and life, a series of 



156 UNIVERSITY EXTENSION ADDRESSES 

unnumbered acts, must answer to some end, some 
ideal, mean or generous, seen by the eye of the heart, 
and pursued consciously or often unconsciously, which 
gives a unity and a clue to the bewildering mazes of 
human conduct. The word progress is unmeaning 
without reference to an ideal. And I would say of 
ideals that which was said here of abstract thoughts 
by a distinguished scholar and statesman, that they 
" are the meat and drink of life." They support us, and, 
still more, they rule us. 

It is, then, momentous that we should pause from 
time to time to regard our ideals. They exercise their 
influence upon us insensibly. We grow like the object 
of our desire perhaps before we have distinctly realised 
its true nature ; and so we may find ourselves like some 
of the souls at the close of Plato's Eepublic, involved 
in unexpected calamities through a heedless choice. 
At the same time, the effort to give distinctness to our 
ideals brings with it a purifying power. For, after all, 
there is but one ideal in which we can find rest — that 
which answers to the truth of things. To this alone 
the name ideal properly belongs. It remains when all 
illusions pass away. By us " who are but parts " it is 
seen in parts, but it is one. It exists already. And 
we were born to seek it, to find it, to recognise it, to 
show it. " It is not," as has been nobly said, " the 
creation, but the gradual discovery of the human in- 
tellect." Yes ; the best will be done ; is on the 
divine side done now. There is an order in which all 
fragments will find their due place — 

On the earth the broken arcs : in the heaven a perfect round. 
This conviction that there is an order in things 



THE BISHOP OF DURHAM 157 

which we do not make, but can discern and interpret, is 
the inspiration of the man of science and of the artist, 
no less than of the man of affairs. The man of science 
dimly perceives that after which he is feeling. Pheno- 
mena speak to him with a voice which others cannot 
hear, because he has known in some degree their vital 
coherence, and he trusts to the perfection of the 
harmony of which he has found the first promise. To 
the artist outward things are signs rather than copies. 
He uses them to suggest to others what he discerns 
behind them. His work is not an end in itself, but a 
revelation of that which is beyond. And for the 
statesman ideals are the adequate support of resolute 
and unwearied patience. 

It was said, I think, of Michael Angelo that he 
often hewed the marble before him without a model, 
as one who was setting free a figure imprisoned in the 
block, clear to his artist eye. The image is a just 
representation of the work of life. Our work in life 
is to set free from manifold encumbrances that which 
is present about us, good and true and lovely. But 
we must first see the ideal which we desire to bring 
to view, and the vigour of action depends upon the 
clearness of our sight, and such clearness comes through 
discipline. Every prospect on which we look is for 
us as we are. The phenomena are the material which 
are offered to us to use and interpret, and as the 
quickened soul realises their meaning and their 
relations, seeing becomes beholding, and the partial 
apprehension of the ideal by which and towards which 
we have been guided. 

So to keep the ideal before us in the midst of our 
common occupations, to guard the conviction that there 



158 UNIVERSITY EXTENSION ADDRESSES 

is an ideal, is to preserve the first freshness of our 
early impressions of the mysterious beauty of the world. 
Poets tell us that in the pilgrimage of life we shall 
watch the glory fade away from the things of earth. 
But if it be so, the fault lies with us. It will be 
because with the growth of things we have not grown 
to match. The halo still encircles the bush in the 
wilderness when we have learnt to study the material 
elements by themselves, only it is found to come by 
the gift of Heaven. The sunshine which floods the 
whole landscape at mid-day is the same as that which 
was seen as a star of dawn when, it lighted the solitary 
mountain peak, only it is infinitely vaster, and there- 
fore harder to comprehend in its fulness. 

But while this is so, the conditions of living tempt 
or constrain us more and more to regard phenomena 
in relation to our own needs, and we come to forget 
their larger meaning. I have somewhere seen that 
an American writer has recorded how, when he was 
engaged as a pilot on the Mississippi, he was at first 
filled with adoring wonder at the magnificence of the 
sunsets, and then in the course of his work came to 
regard them as useful weather signs. But while we 
welcome the utilitarian interpretation we need not 
acquiesce in it. This itself points to something greater 
by emphasising one of the harmonies of creation. 
Here, as elsewhere, the part enables us to rise to a 
fuller conception of the whole, if only the thought of 
the whole is present with us. So, moving from frag- 
ment to fragment, we learn to give distinctness to our 
ideal, and to feel the unity and grandeur of the sum 
of being through our own experience. If the past 
shows no attainment, it shows many advances and 



THE BISHOP OF DURHAM 159 

points to the hoped-for end. Tracing by intelligible 
marks how things have come to be, as far as they fall 
within the range of our powers, we look forward with 
a prophetic trust. We make the power of poetry our 
own, which a poet has defined to be " the feeling of a 
former world and of a future one." We come into 
contact with what has been truly called " the collective 
thought," and are kindled by the spirit of humanity, 
that humanity which is " a man that lives and learns 
for ever." Exceptional occurrences, oppositions in 
thought, material phenomena, transcending all concep- 
tion in their necessary conditions, take their place in 
our view as indications of a larger order. Man, society, 
nature, are seen to be instinct with one life, and 
regarded, even as we can now regard them, inspire the 
spectator with patience at once and hope. 

Such a temper, which answers to the highest ideal 
of man and of his dwelling-place, is intensely practical. 
It is not for intellectual indulgence : it is a spur to 
action. It enforces a thought — a fragment of the 
ideal — till the thought is recognised as a principle, 
and in due course the principle is embodied as a fact. 
Thoreau has said well, " If you have built castles in 
the air your labour need not be lost; that is where 
they should be. Now put the foundations under 
them." 

The temper is practical and it is attainable. I am 
inclined to say it is necessary for every human life. 
The average man, the man of business, the artisan, 
the miner require the vision of the ideal, and they are 
capable of it. The vision of the ideal guards monotony 
of work from becoming monotony of life. The simplest 
home finds a place for it. And no problem is pressed 



160 UNIVERSITY EXTENSION ADDRESSES 

upon us now with more continuous urgency than how 
that place shall be rightly filled. The University 
Extension Movement is one important help towards 
the solution of the problem. 

University teaching tends, I believe, with ever 
accumulating force and directness to quicken and to 
sustain ideals. It is characteristically structural, 
catholic, equalising, chastening, historical, personal, 
spiritual. Let me, in the fewest possible words, en- 
deavour to explain and justify this formidable list of 
epithets. To every University man each word will, 
I think, recall a debt which must grow with the 
growth of life. 

University teaching is, I say, structural. It aims, 
I mean, at giving a sense of the whole and pre- 
serving the proportion of the parts. It insists on a 
general training and a special training. It brings 
intelligent sympathy with all studies, and guides to 
the mastery of some one. It provides that the physical 
student shall understand the aims, the resources, the 
achievements of literature ; and that the scholar shall 
understand the methods and the limitations of physical 
science. 

It is catholic. A University is strong enough 
to prevent the overpowering dominance of a popular 
pursuit. It is hospitable alike to the enthusiasm 
which proclaims new thoughts and to the reverence 
which lingers over the thoughts of a past age. It is 
tolerant of all things except one-sided arrogance. No 
specialist can move among bands of fellow-students 
preoccupied with other interests without feeling the 
amplitude of knowledge and of life, and the manifold 
relations in which his own subject stands to others on 



THE BISHOP OF DURHAM 161 

which he cannot enter. The common search for truth 
and right brings mutual respect ; and the teacher who. 
has felt the subtle influence of the University must 
himself in turn diffuse its spirit. 

It is equalising. Nowhere is fellowship more com- 
plete among representatives of every class than at a 
University. There poverty is no reproach, and wealth 
is no title to superiority. The foremost students are 
bound, perhaps unconsciously, in a brotherhood of 
heart through which comes the power of penetrating 
to the noblest in each man. The teacher who has 
learnt his lessons under such social conditions will 
be eager to bring the best to the humblest as a 
fellow-heir with him of the wealth of humanity ;. and 
he will not accept as permanent . conditions of life 
which exclude any class or any man from access to 
his birthright. 

It is chastening. The University teacher cannot 
forget that his office is not to supersede labour, but to 
stimulate it. He will not entertain the vulgar notion 
that we can bestow on others our thoughts as we can 
bestow on them our money, so that they can employ 
them rightly before they have made them their own. 
He will bear in mind the pregnant saying of an old 
divine, " We have ourselves as we use ourselves." He 
will make it clear that great books can only be read 
in the spirit in which they were written, as serious 
work and not as indolent amusement. He will, there- 
fore, claim from his hearers the difficult service of 
thinking, as one who knows that the true teacher, like 
Nature, gives nothing but materials and opportunities 
and impulse. 

It is historical. A University is not a bureau. 

M 



162 UNIVERSITY EXTENSION ADDRESSES 

It is a living body, a complex result of life, and not 
an official provision for carrying into effect a formal 
scheme. The teaching which answers to it is, as a 
necessary consequence, vital and not intellectual only. 
It bears the impress of many associations, old and new. 
It is flexible, in the largest sense human, of the past 
at once and of the present. A Cambridge man might 
find it hard to analyse or to estimate the effect which 
has been produced upon him by the great libraries, by 
the old buildings wedded to new, by the chapels of 
Trinity or King's, yet he will know that they have in 
many undefined ways given him breadth and sym- 
pathy and tenderness which will colour his own 
work. 

It is personal. The method of learning is, I 
believe, of scarcely less moment than the matter. The 
student who has mastered a subject by the help of a 
text-book occupies a very different position intellect- 
ually and morally from one who has gained his know- 
ledge in continuous contact with a teacher. The frank 
questioning, the interchange of thought, the influence 
of personal enthusiasm, the inspiring power of living 
words, which come in the free intercourse of the class- 
room, give a force and meaning to facts and theories 
which the book cannot convey. 

It is spiritual. The end of the teacher whose 
work we strive to follow is not fixed by the communi- 
cation of his special lesson. He will seek, indeed, to 
do this as perfectly as possible, but he will at the 
same time suggest the vast fields which lie unexplored 
even in his own department ; he will make clear the 
limitations and assumptions under which his results 
are obtained; he will add, if I may so express the 



THE BISHOP OF DURHAM 163 

truth, the symbol of infinity to the provisional state- 
ments which represent the actual attainments of man ; 
he will use the most effective technical education as 
the vehicle of wider culture. Literature, art, science 
will be for him partial revelations of a boundless life ; 
and it will be his object to make the life felt through 
the least part with which he deals. 

If, then, this is the general character of University 
teaching, however imperfectly it may be realised by 
the individual teacher, we may rightly maintain that 
it does, as I have said, tend to quicken and sustain 
ideals, to bring into view the loftiest aspects of man 
and nature, to assure to thought and action that 
liberal freedom which corresponds with the sense of 
absolute law, to keep open a free course for aspirations 
and endeavours which rise beyond the conventional 
standard of custom. 

Hitherto the Universities have fulfilled their teach- 
ing office for a few. Now they are endeavouring to 
extend it to every town and village, and to make it 
effective even for those who are busily engaged in 
various industries. The movement corresponds in 
many respects with that out of which the old Univer- 
sities themselves arose. It is still experimental, but 
the results already obtained have far more than satis- 
fied the hopes of those who watched the beginning of 
the movement not without anxiety. They have won 
a distinct academic recognition at Cambridge, and they 
have contributed, I believe, in no small degree to 
create the desire for a teaching University in London. 
For, however important the test of an examination 
may be for fixing the value of acquirements, the dis- 
cipline of learning is yet more important for character ; 



164 UNIVERSITY EXTENSION ADDRESSES 

and this discipline the Extension system offers in a 
form equally attractive and stimulating. 

Such a system, fitted to bring many-sided liberal 
culture to every condition of life, to enlarge common 
interests, to deepen fellowship, to create simplicity 
through refinement, and to check the passion for 
excitement by the force of purer interests, would be 
welcome at any time. 

But it is of singular importance now, when we are 
in danger of losing the true conceptions of nature, 
humanity, and life, and the calm vigour of action is 
failing us. The inspiration of great ideals seems to 
be alone able to meet the intellectual distraction, the 
materialism, the critical indifferentism, and the conse- 
quent enfeebling of will which appear to be the 
dominant perils of our age. 

On the one side our attention is concentrated on 
isolated subjects. We are absorbed in the study of 
fragments. We are fascinated by minute details. 
We unconsciously treat our little domain as the whole. 
On the other side, in the eager hurry of life, every one 
is expected to possess a ready acquaintance with all 
that can be known. In this way genuine labour and 
superficial borrowing of opinions become equally de- 
structive of broad and balanced judgment. But the 
contemplation of a great ideal of nature will bring 
proportion to special inquiries and justly discredit the 
affectation of an impossible omniscience. The worth 
of our own little service will be seen to be fixed by 
the grandeur of the cause to which it is rendered, and 
the worth of our knowledge by the help which it 
brings to others. 

Again, as long as our aims, our methods, our 



THE BISHOP OF DURHAM 165 

sanctions are material, there can be no equal fellow- 
ship, no enthusiasm of service, no stable peace. Wealth 
to be held irresponsibly as a private possession is 
tacitly accepted as the standard of success. The skill 
which we labour to gain is regarded as a weapon to 
overcome a rival. The final appeal is to strong bat- 
talions. But the contemplation of a great ideal of 
humanity will constrain us to recognise as axioms that 
classes, nations, races rejoice and suffer together ; that 
every possession, every power of a society or a people, 
is an instrument for wider service ; that the accordant 
voices of history and conscience give a verdict which 
no force can arrest from final execution. 

Yet, again, we are reminded at every turn that 
men who should be prophets and pioneers of a noble 
future are content to sink into expositors of the past 
or present. They devote themselves to making a 
survey, an analysis, a description. Life becomes a 
study without a moral, treated as equally interesting 
and equally transitory in all its forms, a drama pro- 
vided for the amusement of those who are in a position 
to forget that the actors are men of like passions and 
like destiny with themselves. But as one of the most 
noble of modern political leaders said with his latest 
voice : " Our world is not a spectacle ; it is a field of 
battle upon which all who in their hearts love justice, 
beauty, and holiness are bound — whether as leaders or 
soldiers, conquerors or martyrs — to play their part." 
And the contemplation of a great ideal of life will 
sustain the combatant in the struggle, and through 
every failure enable him to strive as knowing that, 
for states, as for men, the test of abiding greatness is 
the power of sacrifice. 



166 UNIVERSITY EXTENSION ADDRESSES 

Such an ideal will give back also, strengthened and 
purified, the true conviction of personal responsibility. 
At present we first shrink from forming a decision, 
and then we improvise one. We are first irresolute 
and then precipitate. It must be so till we fix our 
eyes upon an unchangeable goal and have faith to 
move towards it. As we do so we may err in this 
step or that, but we shall never go wrong as to the 
line of our advance. Thus only can we do our work. 
An ideal is, we have seen, a condition of sustained 
action ; and action is the mark of a man. He is born 
not to think, as regarding one element only of his con- 
stitution ; not to be, as gathering into himself all the 
treasures which he can command ; but to act, to con- 
secrate to one supreme cause the fulness of his powers, 
as knowing that life is not a search for personal happi- 
ness or aggrandisement, not an effort after self-centred 
culture, but the accomplishment of a divine service. 

Such ideals of nature, humanity, life, are, I repeat, 
intensely practical, even if they are unattainable. 
They are as sunlight upon our common ways. And 
the teachings which this Society is seeking to gain and 
to spread brings them into the very heart of our 
common business. And it is on this that I wish to 
lay the utmost stress. We cannot all be scholars or 
philosophers or physicists, but we can all enter on the 
blessings of the larger heritage which it is the office 
of such explorers to gather. We can do our humblest 
tasks thoroughly and liberally, not as drudges, but as 
fellow- workers with saints and heroes ; we can feel 
that we, too, in the lowest places, are servants of an 
illustrious commonwealth ; we can find the oppor- 
tunity for a generous career each in our narrow 



THE BISHOP OF DURHAM 167 

circle ; we can pursue our peculiar work in the spirit 
which is common to us all as men, and enjoy the 
invigorating energy of a larger being ; we can, if I may 
so use your motto, learn to convert that which is a 
means of livelihood into a means of life. 

And it is, I believe, by the help of these noblest 
ideals — ideals which belong to men as men, the 
ideals of our Christian faith — that purity and peace 
and freedom and dignity will be given to the 
masses of our countrymen. This conviction has 
brought me here to-day that I might plead once 
more for a work which I have watched with grati- 
tude from its beginning. Only let those of us who 
have caught some distant glimpse of the beauty 
of creation as the thought of God, and of the obli- 
gation of labour as the lot of man, tell courageously 
what we have seen and known. All who share our 
nature are capable of our highest visions, and 
awakened reverence will do her perfect work. The 
ruined denes of Durham will then smile once more, 
and smoke-wrapped rows of huts will give place to 
homes of men. Ideals grow wider, and brighter, and 
nearer with our own years and with the years of the 
world. I see now that far more is within a measur- 
able distance for nations and for men than seemed 
possible when I was first stirred by great hopes in my 
school days. Thoughts whispered then with bated 
breath have become commonplaces. We know our 
dangers ; in part, we know our aims and resources. 
We stand on the edge of a new age. It is for the 
young to shape it. To them we commit without fear 
our ideals and our faith. 



THE INFLUENCE OF THE GEEEK MIND 
ON MODERN" LIFE 



By Professor t Jebb, Litt.D., M.P. 



1893 



When the President of the London University 
Extension Society honoured me with an invitation to 
address you to-day, he at the same time encouraged 
me to hope that a subject connected with classical 
literature would be deemed admissible on the present 
occasion, and that there were circumstances in the 
work of the Society during the last few years which 
would render such a choice appropriate. Since the 
summer of 1889 numerous courses of lectures on 
Greek literature and Greek art have, I believe, been 
given, under the auspices of this Society, by men of 
high eminence in the subjects which they severally 
undertook, as well as by ladies whose distinguished 
attainments in classical archaeology are joined to the 
happiest gifts of exposition. Such teachers were 
assured beforehand of attentive hearers ; but the 
success which has followed these lectures, in respect 
alike of the numbers attending them and the zeal 
evoked, has surpassed the most sanguine expectations 



PROFESSOR JEBB 169 

that could have been formed. These results have 
afforded fresh evidence of a fact which has long been 
known to experienced workers in the field of popular 
teaching, viz., that large and constantly increasing 
numbers of men and women, of all classes and callings, 
are beginning to comprehend the twofold claim which 
entitles Greek to a permanent place in a liberal 
education : first, the claim arising from its intrinsic 
power to satisfy mental and moral wants which 
become more widely felt the more widely liberal 
studies are diffused; and, secondly, the historical 
claim, arising from the relation of Greece to the 
literature and the life of subsequent ages. It seemed 
to me, then, that the moment was a favourable one 
for inviting you to consider, though it be only in 
rapid outline, the general nature of the influence 
which Greece has exerted, and must always exert, 
over the modern world. 1 

The very name of this noble hall, in which your 
Lordship's courtesy permits us to meet to-day, recalls a 
part of that prehistoric background against which the 
Greek genius first shone forth. The immemorial 
civilisation on the banks of the Nile had gradually 
passed under the bondage of stereotyped formulas, as 
despotism of another kind overshadowed the lands of 
the Tigris and the Euphrates, when the Greek spirit, 
in the first glow of a youth which has proved 
immortal, was beginning to clear the path of mankind 
to political liberty, to the recognition of natural 
beauty, and to the fearless pursuit of knowledge. If, 

1 Some passages in this address are taken, with modifications, from 
the first and last of a course of lectures which I gave at Baltimore in 
1892, and which have since been published under the title of The 
Growth and Influence of Classical Greek Poetry. — R. C. J. 



170 UNIVERSITY EXTENSION ADDRESSES 

again, we look back from a modern standing-point on 
the various parts played in human progress by various 
members of the Indo-European family, how singular 
do the faculties of the Greek race appear, alike in 
compass and in harmony ! This might be illustrated 
from the history of modern art, when some felicity of 
invention or achievement is explained by the. fact that 
several strains of lineage, several branches of the 
Indo-European stock, have contributed to a result 
which no one of them Could have produced alone. 
Thus, the most signal achievement of the Erench 
genius in art has been the creation of Gothic archi- 
tecture ; and, as the President of the Eoyal Academy 
reminded its students some years ago, the cradle of 
that architecture was the Eoyal Domain of central 
France, a region in which the Celtic blood of the Cymri 
was mingled with the Latin element derived from the 
Eomans, and with the Teutonic element furnished by 
the Eranks, giving birth to that Gothic style which 
blends freedom with self-restraint, audacity with 
prudence, and science with emotion. No similar 
analysis can be applied to the masterpieces of the 
Greek architect and the Greek sculptor. Imperfect 
though our knowledge is, does it not warrant the 
belief that no people has yet appeared upon the earth 
whose faculty for art, in the largest sense of the term, 
was at once so fine and so comprehensive ? 

But it is through the classical literature of Greece 
that the mind of the race is most fully known to us. 
There is a passage in one of Macaulay's earliest 
writings — a review of Mitford in Knight's Quarterly 
Magazine — from which I will quote a few sentences, 
because they put the claim of Greek literature in the 



PROFESSOR JEBB 171 

boldest form, — one which many readers, probably, 
would deem extravagant, or even paradoxical. " If 
we consider," he says, " the subtlety of disquisition, the 
force of imagination, the perfect energy and elegance 
of expression, which characterise the great works of 
Athenian genius, we must pronounce them intrinsically 
most valuable ; but what shall we say when we 
reflect that from hence have sprung, directly or 
indirectly, all the noblest creations of the human 
intellect ; that from hence were the vast accomplish- 
ments and the brilliant fancy of Cicero, the wither- 
ing tire of Juvenal, the plastic imagination of Dante, 
the humour of Cervantes, the comprehension of 
Bacon, the wit of Butler, the supreme and universal 
excellence of Shakespeare ? " The claim which 
Macaulay here makes for Greek literature would be 
extravagant indeed if it meant that Cicero was 
brilliant because he had profited by Demosthenes, that 
Juvenal's satire was inspired by Aristophanes, that 
Dante was vivid and sublime because Yirgil had 
given him glimpses of Homer, that the humour of 
Cervantes and the wit of Butler flowed from an Attic 
source, that Bacon's grasp was due to study of 
Aristotle, or that Shakespeare, who had small Latin 
and less Greek, was the prince of dramatists by grace 
of the Dionysiac Theatre. In what sense, then, if 
in any, is the claim a just one ? In this — that 
the Greeks were the people with whom the very con- 
ception of artistic literature began; that, in all the 
principal branches of poetry and of prose, the Greek 
mind achieved work so abounding with intellectual 
life, and so excellent in form, as to remain for after- 
ages an inspiration and a standard. 



172 UNIVERSITY EXTENSION ADDRESSES 

The vital power of the Greek spirit was indeed not 
fully disclosed until, after suffering a partial eclipse in 
the Macedonian age, it emerged in a new quality, as a 
source of illumination to the Italian masters of the 
world. Under the plastic touch of conquered Greece, 
the Latin language was gradually moulded into an 
apter instrument of literature, while the "Eoman intel- 
lect itself acquired, in some measure, a flexibility not 
native to it. Through Eome the Greek influence was 
transmitted to medieval Europe in a form which 
obscured much of its charm, yet also served to extend 
its empire. In the earlier period of the Eenaissance, 
the scholars of Italy, where the revival had its chief 
seat, were engrossed with Latin literature ; they 
regarded it as their Italian heritage, restored to them 
after long deprivation. Greek studies, though ardently 
pursued by a few, remained, on the whole, in the back- 
ground. And it may be said that the general spirit of 
the classical revival continued to be Latin rather than 
Greek down to the latter part of the last century. 
Even where the Greek language was most cultivated, 
there was comparatively little sense of what is 
characteristic and distinctive in the best Greek litera- 
ture. This sense was developed, in the second half of 
the eighteenth century, chiefly through two agencies. 
One was the study of Greek art, as advanced by such 
men as Winckelmann and Lessing, — bringing with it 
the perception that those qualities which characterise 
the best Greek art are also present in the best Greek 
literature. The other agency was a reaction against 
that conventional classicism, wearing a Latin garb, 
which had so long been dominant. Minds insurgent 
against that tyranny turned with joyous relief to the 



PROFESSOR JEBB 173 

elastic freedom of the Greek intellect, to the living 
charm of Greek poetry and art. Goethe and Schiller 
are representatives of the new impulse. The great 
gain of the movement which thus began was that, for 
the first time since the Eevival of Letters, the Greek 
originals stood out distinct from the Latin copies. 
Men acquired a truer sense of the Hellenic genius, and 
the current of Hellenic influence upon modern life 
began to flow in a clear channel of its own, no longer 
confused with the somewhat turbid stream of Eenais- 
sance classicism. 

Meanwhile, however, modern literature and art had 
experienced the influence of other forces, acting in very 
different ways ; and with these forces the Hellenic 
influence had to reckon. One of these was the pro- 
duct of medieval Catholicism, which had given art a 
new genius. A new world of beauty had arisen, even 
more different from the pagan world than the Empire 
of the twelfth century was different from that of the 
first. Greek art had sprung from a free, cheerful life, 
open to all the bright impressions of external nature, a 
life warmed by frank human sympathies, and lit up 
with fancy controlled by reason. The lawgivers of 
medieval art were men withdrawn from communion 
with the outward world by the rapture of a devotion 
at once half mystic and intensely real; instead of 
flexible intelligence they had religious passion ; instead 
of the Greek's clear outlook upon the facts of humanity, 
they had a faith which transfigured the actual world. 
The Greek artist, even in portraying passion, was mind- 
ful of balance, and placed certain limits upon the 
expression of individual character. The medieval 
artist strove before all things to express the intensity 



174 UNIVERSITY EXTENSION ADDRESSES 

of the individual soul. In poetry Dante is the great 
exponent of this spirit. And medieval Catholicism 
deeply coloured the sentiment of all the literature 
known by the general name of romantic. In Goethe's 
younger days the conflict between the classical and the 
romantic schools raged fiercely. THe interlude of 
Helena, which forms the third act in the second part of 
Faust, was the work of his old age. Faust's nature is 
to be elevated and purified by developing in him the 
sense of beauty ; Helena represents the classical, but 
especially the Greek element in art and literature ; 
and when Faust at last wins her, their union typifies 
the reconciliation of the romantic with the classical. 
Goethe himself dated a new life, a mental regeneration, 
from the time when he first seized the true spirit of 
the ancient masters. These are his own words, speak- 
ing of Greek art and literature : " Clearness of vision, 
cheerfulness of acceptance, easy grace of expression, are 
the qualities which delight us ; and now, when we 
affirm that we find all these in the genuine Grecian 
works, achieved in the noblest material, the best pro- 
portioned form, with certainty and completeness of 
execution, we shall be understood if we always refer to 
them as a basis and a standard. Let each one be a 
Grecian in his own way, but let him be one." In 
that allegorical strain which pervades the Helena, 
Goethe has not failed to mark that, while the Hellenic 
idea of beauty is supreme, the romantic element has 
also enriched modern life. The gifts are not all from 
one side. The symmetry, the clear outlines, the cheer- 
ful repose of classical art, are wedded to the sentiment, 
passion, and variety of the romantic. The great 
German poet felt, and has expressed with wonderful 



PROFESSOR JEBB 175 

subtlety, the truth that no modern can absolutely 
dissociate the Hellenic influence from the others 
which have contributed to shape our modern life ; no 
one can now be a pure Hellene, nor, if he could, would 
it be desirable ; but every one should recognise the 
special elements with which the Hellenic ideal can 
ennoble and chasten the modern spirit, and these he 
should by all means cultivate. To do so successfully, 
is to educate one's sense of beauty; and to do that 
aright, is so far to improve one's whole nature. This 
lesson, taught half mystically in the second part of 
Faust, has sometimes been obscured by what Mr. 
Matthew Arnold called the Hebraising tendency. We 
remember his definition, in Culture and Anarchy, of 
Hebraism as contrasted with Hellenism. The govern- 
ing idea of Hellenism is spontaneity of consciousness ; 
that of Hebraism is strictness of conscience : both seek, 
in the Hebrew apostle's words, to make us partakers 
of the divine nature ; but Hellenism seeks to do this 
through the reason, by making us see things as they 
are; Hebraism insists rather upon conduct and 
obedience. In our own country the intellectual in- 
fluence of the Eenaissance was crossed, and for a time 
checked, by the Hebraising tendency. But, though 
there is a profound difference, there is no necessary 
antagonism between the ideal broadly described as 
Hebraic, and the permanent, the essential parts of 
Hellenism. The Greek influence has acted upon 
modern life and literature even more widely as a 
pervading and quickening spirit than as an exemplar 
of form ; and it has shown itself capable of co-operat- 
ing, in this subtle manner, with various alien forces, so 
as neither to lose its own distinction, nor to infringe 



176 UNIVERSITY EXTENSION ADDRESSES 

upon theirs. Milton illustrates this. By temperament 
no less than creed he is a Puritan of the higher type. 
Steeped though he was in classical literature, the 
pervading spirit of his work is at any rate not Greek ; 
it is more akin to the Hebraic, or, when not that, to 
the Koman. The Lycidas, for instance, is a pastoral 
elegy on an Alexandrian Greek model; but how 
strangely the temper of the Hellenic original is changed 
when the English poet's wrath blazes forth against the 
corruptions of the time. He shows his own conscious- 
ness of this in reverting to his theme : — 

Return, Alpheus, the dread voice is past 

That shrunk thy streams ; return, Sicilian Muse ! 

The Samson Agonistes has the form of a Greek drama, 
but its inspiration, like its subject, is far more Hebraic 
than Hellenic. Yet no one acquainted with the best 
Greek poetry can read Milton without feeling what its 
influence has contributed to his genius ; it has helped 
to give him his lofty self-restraint and his serenity. 

But the deepest and largest influence of Greece is 
not to be sought in the modern literature which treats 
Greek subjects or imitates Greek form ; that influence 
works more characteristically when, having been 
received into the modern mind, it acts by suggestion 
and inspiration, breathing a grace and a power of its 
own into material and form of a different origin. 
This influence has been all-pervading in the modern 
world. Yet those who most appreciate the true value 
of Hellenism will never claim for it that, by itself, 
it can suffice for the needs of humanity. In the intel- 
lectual province its value is not only permanent but 
unique. It has furnished models of excellence which 



PROFESSOR JEBB 177 

can never be superseded ; by its spirit it supplies a 
medicine for diseases of the modern mind, a corrective 
for aberrations of modern taste, a discipline no less 
than a delight for the modern imagination ; since that 
obedience to reason which it exacts is also a return to 
the most gracious activities of life and nature. Of 
such a power we may truly say : — 

it will never 
Pass into nothingness, but still will keep 
A bower of quiet for us, and a sleep 
Full of sweet dreams, and health, and quiet breathing. 

But in the province of religion and morals Hellen- 
ism alone is not sufficient. Greek polytheism, even as 
ennobled by the great poets, was incapable of generat- 
ing religious conceptions which could satisfy the 
mind and heart, or of furnishing an adequate rule for 
the conduct of life. These must be sought from 
another source. Yet there is no inherent conflict 
between true Hellenism and spiritualised Hebraism 
such as is contained in Christianity. The distinctive 
quality of the best Greek literature and art, that by 
which it has lived and will live, is the faculty of 
rising from the earth into a clearer air. " The divine," 
says Plato in the Phaedrus, " is beauty, wisdom, good- 
ness, and the like ; by these the wing of the soul is 
nourished, and grows apace; but when fed upon evil, 
it wastes and falls away." The Greek spirit, in its 
noblest form, is indeed, to borrow Plato's beautiful 
phrase, " the power of the wing " for the human soul. 
The visions to which it can soar are such as that 
described in the Phaedrus, where beauty is beheld 
dwelling with modesty in a holy place. The best 
Greek work in every kind is essentially pure ; to 

N 



178 UNIVERSITY EXTENSION ADDRESSES 

conceive it as necessarily entangled with the baser 
elements of paganism is to confound the accidents with 
the essence ; the accidents have passed away ; the 
essence is imperishable. 

A further claim which may be made for the best 
Greek work is that it is capable of acting as an intel- 
lectual tonic, and of bracing us for the battle of life. 
" To pass from the study of Homer to the business of 
the world/' says Mr. Gladstone, "is to step out of a 
palace of enchantment into the cold gray light of a 
polar day. But the spells in which this enchanter 
deals have no affinity with that drug from Egypt 
which drowns the spirit in effeminate indifference; 
rather they are like the §ap\iaKov icrOXov, the remedial 
specific, which, freshening the understanding by con- 
tact with the truth and strength of nature, should both 
improve its vigilance against deceit and danger, and 
increase its vigour and resolution for the discharge of 
duty." The tribute here rendered to Homer might be 
paid, with not less justice, to the classical Greek poetry 
as a whole. True to Aristotle's principle for art, this 
poetry deals with the universal, — with those elements 
of human character and life which are not transient or 
abnormal, but of interest for every age and every land. 
On the high places, the templet, serena, of Greek 
literature and art, those who are worn with the troubles 
or disturbed by the mental maladies of modern civilisa- 
tion can breathe an atmosphere which, like that of 
Greece itself, has the freshness of the mountains and 
the sea. But the loneliness of Oeta or Cithaeron is 
not there; we have around us on those summits also 
the cheerful sympathies of human life, the pleasant 
greetings of the kindly human voice. The great 



PROFESSOR JEBB 179 

thinkers and artists of ancient Hellas recall the words 
in which Aeschylus described those kinsmen of JSTiobe 
who worshipped their ancestral deity on the mountain- 
heights of Mysia : — 

the seed of gods, 
Men near to Zeus ; for whom on Ida burns, 
High in the clear air, the altar of their sire, 
Nor hath their race yet lost the blood divine. 

Humanity cannot afford to lose out of its inheritance 
any part of the best work which has been done for it 
in the past. All that is most beautiful and most 
instructive in Greek achievement is our permanent 
possession ; one which can be enjoyed without detri- 
ment to those other studies which modern life demands ; 
one which no lapse of time can make obsolete, and 
which no multiplication of interests can make super- 
fluous. Each successive generation must learn from 
ancient Greece that which can be taught by her alone. 
Through what channels, in what modes, has her 
teaching been most largely operative upon the world ? 
History shows how, from the Eoman age to our own, 
Greece has everywhere helped to educate gifted minds, 
from which her light has radiated in ever widening 
circles. It has been her privilege to elicit a sense of 
kinship in the finer spirits of every race, and to enter 
as a vitalising essence into the most varied forms of 
modern thought, bringing to every such alliance some 
distinction which no other element could have conferred. 
But the peculiar characteristic of this influence among 
us in recent years is the vast increase in the number 
of those who receive it, not indirectly merely, but 
directly, through their own study of Greek literature 
and art. As regards the literature, this has been 



180 UNIVERSITY EXTENSION ADDRESSES 

largely due to the appearance of really good transla- 
tions. Through these a reader may learn to appreciate 
some qualities, at least, of the best Greek writers. In 
regard to art, again, any one whose eye has been trained 
to recognise the distinction of the best Greek work has 
learned much. 

But the qualities of the Greek language are such, 
that the difference made by a knowledge of it to one's 
appreciation of the literature is greater than in the 
case, for instance, of Latin, or German, or even of 
French. In these languages, of course, as in all others, 
very much is lost by translation ; yet not so much as 
in Greek. The comprehension of Greek art, again, is 
distinctly aided by a knowledge of the Greek language, 
as the best archaeologists would, I think, agree ; and 
these facts follow from that general character of Greek 
which I must now attempt, however briefly, to describe. 
Compare classical Greek with its elder sister, the 
literary language of ancient India, and the difference is 
striking. Sanskrit has been the more faithful guardian 
of old Indo-European sounds and forms ; the trans- 
parency of its structure gives it an unequalled value 
for students in relation to that whole family of 
languages. Greek attracts by a different charm. The 
thought which it suggests is rather — how wonder- 
fully this language has achieved the purposes inherent 
in its own particular genius ! It is an instrument 
which responds with happy elasticity to every demand 
of the Greek intellect. The forms which it has 
retained are light, graceful, flexible. It can express 
the most delicate shades of meaning with an elegant 
simplicity. This power is due, not only to its organic 
structure, but also to the tact with which words ex- 



PROFESSOR JEBB 181 

pressing the same general idea have been discriminated 
in its rich vocabulary. The Greek language is the 
earliest work Of art created by the spontaneous working 
of the Greek mind, and it is the greatest work of 
Greek art which has survived. If those fragments of 
Greek architecture and sculpture which we so prize 
had come down to us without any credentials of their 
origin, simply as relics of an otherwise unknown race, 
it would not have been fantastic to conjecture that, of 
all the peoples recorded in history, the only one pre- 
sumably capable of producing such monuments in 
marble was the same people whose thoughts had 
moulded, and whose spirit had chastened, the most 
perfect among the forms of human speech. The 
characteristic qualities of the Greek language are no- 
where seen to greater advantage than in the Homeric 
poems, although the Homeric language has not yet 
fully developed certain traits which the Attic dialect 
shows in perfection. We perceive in Homer how 
vividly this language bears the stamp of the imagina- 
tion which has shaped it. The Greek saw the object 
of his thought directly and clearly. His first aim in 
speaking was to make the expression fit the thought. 
When an imagination of this kind, unclouded by any 
haze of literary reminiscence, and free from conscious 
striving after effect, soars into the region of the mar- 
vellous or the ideal, it still commands the obedience of 
the language which it has disciplined in the field of 
natural observation. Consider, for instance, the preter- 
natural elements in the Odyssey. The Oriental art, 
which embodied an abstract conception or a mystic 
dogma in some hybrid or monstrous animal shape, was 
merely making an effort of symbolism. The spectator 



182 UNIVERSITY EXTENSION ADDRESSES 

may comprehend the meaning or accept the doctrine, 
but he does not believe in the monster. The reader of 
the Odyssey, on the other hand, who feels the persons 
to be real, is not robbed of his illusion when Circe 
changes the hero's companions into swine ; or when 
the flesh of the Sun-god's oxen bellows on the spits ; 
or when Poseidon petrifies the Phaeacian ship. The 
human verisimilitude of the whole disguises the im- 
possibility of the details ; we scarcely feel at the 
moment that they are impossible. But how has this 
effect been attained ? By an imagination which, 
through habitual contact with what is living and real, 
has learned to animate fiction also with the breath of 
life ; and which is served here also by a language so 
faithfully and finely moulded upon nature that, when 
it clothes a narrative of the miraculous, the very out- 
lines of the garment disarm suspicion as to the form 
which they invest. Such is the general character of 
the Greek language — a perfect organ of expression, 
showing essentially the same qualities which appear in 
the best Greek art. 

We ought all to rejoice, then, in the remarkable 
success of a new experiment in teaching that language, 
which has arisen out of the work of this Society. 
Classes have lately been formed for the study of 
Greek, and students who had enjoyed no previous ad- 
vantages of instruction in the language, but whose 
interest in it had been quickened by lectures on the 
literature, have shown a zeal and made a progress of 
which their teachers have reason to be proud. I 
would venture to commend this new enterprise to the 
sympathies of all who are interested in classical studies, 
or indeed in literary studies of any kind. To my 



PROFESSOR JEBB 183 

thinking, it is a movement of great importance, which 
is very likely to mark the beginning of a time when a 
first-hand knowledge of Greek shall be more widely 
diffused. It would be a notable and fruitful result if, 
as these new classes seem to promise, the interest felt 
in the Greek language should grow into anything 
that could fairly be described as a popular interest, 
— so that considerable numbers of students, out- 
side of our great schools and Universities, should set 
themselves to acquire the power of reading the Greek 
literature in the original. I do not think that such a 
hope is chimerical, in view of what has already been 
accomplished by the enthusiasm of teachers and 
students. Perhaps one can scarcely expect that the 
time should soon come when the members of such 
classes, in any large numbers at least, will be able to 
read the more difficult parts of Greek literature ; though 
I have no doubt that some students, when once started, 
will advance rapidly. But we may expect, I think, 
that such a knowledge of Greek as enables one to read 
Xenophon's Anabasis, for instance, will be found such 
a pleasant and profitable acquisition that, even if the 
student should not see his way to going much further, he 
will think that his time has been well spent, and that 
his labour has been well rewarded. I rest this belief 
on the peculiar charm of the Greek language, and on 
the peculiar way in which this charm affects learners, 
almost from the beginning — as I know from my own 
experience. A simple illustration may help to make 
this plainer. There are many children to whom no toy 
is more delightful than a printing-press, and its fascina- 
tion consists chiefly in the leaden types. The letter 
A, for instance, so clear cut, so faultless, as it stands forth 



184 UNIVERSITY EXTENSION ADDRESSES 

from its neat stem — what a contrast it is to the same 
letter as scrawled by pen or pencil; it is a little work 
of art in itself, which appeals to the fancy of an in- 
telligent child. And such as types are to him, such 
are the words of the Greek language to a sympathetic 
learner. The Greek words are, in themselves, so clear- 
cut, so beautifully moulded, that they begin to please 
one's artistic sense even before one has made much 
progress with the language. This pleasure becomes 
keen so soon as one proceeds to put Greek words to- 
gether — even three or four at a time — in the simplest 
sentences ; it is like the child's pleasure in type- 
setting, only more varied. Therefore, for the beginner 
in Greek, we may always prescribe a little easy com- 
position, it does not matter how little or how easy, if 
only it calls this feeling into play. For this feeling is 
not an illusion which will fade in the presence of 
better knowledge. It is the germ of that delight in 
Greek which ripens with study, when the pleasure 
given at first by shapely words is enhanced by a per- 
ception of that symmetry and harmony, that unfailing 
adequacy to the lucid utterance of thought which 
distinguishes the language as wielded by all its great 
masters, alike in verse and in prose. 

I have firm faith, then, in the power of Greek to 
retain the interest which it has once awakened, not only 
for the sake of the treasures which it unlocks, but for 
its own sake also. And I believe that anything which 
tends to make the study of this language popular will 
be valuable in a further way. High specialisation has 
long ago become inevitable in every branch of know- 
ledge. Classical philology is no exception to the rule. 
If a student is to know the best that has been done in 



PROFESSOR JEBB 185 

even a small part of the field, he must concentrate 
himself thereon. But in the case of classical studies 
such completeness at a particular point may be pur- 
chased too dearly. These studies used to be called 
the " Humanities." This name expressed what is, 
after all, the greatest and best gift which they have 
to bestow. Their highest office is to influence the 
character, to chasten the judgment, to illuminate the 
understanding, and, in a word, to render their disciples 
more truly humane. But, in order that they should 
produce these effects, it is necessary that they should 
be approached in a spirit more comprehensive than 
that of the specialist who confines himself to one small 
part of them, and comparatively ignores the rest. It 
is better — for most minds at any rate — to renounce 
the hope of an exhaustive acquaintance with any one 
corner of the field, than to miss the largest benefit 
which the entire discipline can confer. This is what, 
under the conditions of modern scholarship, we are 
perhaps too apt to forget. But, if the study of the 
Greek language were to be spread over a wider area, 
and if a more popular interest in the classics were to 
spring from it, the academic tendency towards exces- 
sive specialising would be gradually tempered by 
more popular instincts ; the classics would be, so far, 
recalled to their paramount function as " Humanities "; 
in this sense, and to this extent, the intellectual 
pleasures tasted by the scholars of the Eenaissance 
would be enjoyed anew by large numbers among us, 
to whom the charm of Greek literature, inseparable as 
it is from that of the Greek language, would come with 
all the joy of a discovery. 

But even this is not the largest issue involved. 



186 UNIVERSITY EXTENSION ADDRESSES 

That eager acceptance of stimulating lectures on the 
classics which has been manifested at several great 
centres of population is only one symptom, though a 
most remarkable one, of a growing desire to know the 
best literature at first hand. There is an eagerness 
abroad in the land to participate in those highest benefits 
of civilisation which are within the common rights of all 
mankind, — those gifts of education which may enable 
every one to live a worthier life, a life of higher 
activities and higher enjoyments, a life in which the 
duties of loyal citizenship can be discharged with 
greater efficiency and intelligence. The strength of 
the University Extension movement resides in the fact 
that it has responded to this desire — indeed, has done 
much to evoke it where it was latent, and to define it 
where it was vague. The Universities, as representing 
the higher education of the country, have gone out to 
the people, clearly seeing that the popular desire is not 
for the second best, but for the best, — only presented 
in forms which can be understood. All thinking 
persons will perceive the immense importance of such 
a movement to the public welfare, not merely in an 
educational sense, but in regard to social stability and 
national security. Nothing could contribute more 
powerfully to preserve the best things which we have 
inherited from our ancestors, or to warrant a con- 
fidence that the new generation will be qualified to deal 
in a wise and enlightened manner with the conditions 
and problems of their time. University Extension 
has created a new profession, which demands special 
gifts and a special training. The distinguished men 
in its ranks have much hard work to do, sometimes 
much drudgery ; and they have often to encounter 



PROFESSOR JEBB 187 

difficulties which only perseverance can surmount. 
But they will be encouraged by the thought that they 
are rendering their country a great service — that they 
are helping to maintain the continuity of its best 
traditions, and to ensure that a people whose self- 
respect has its root in centuries of ordered freedom 
shall be knitted together by ties even stronger and 
nobler than those which united their fathers. 

In conclusion, allow me to thank you for the 
kind patience with which you have listened to these 
remarks. I earnestly hope, and fully believe, that this 
great Society, which has already accomplished so 
much, will go on prospering more and more. In the 
field at which we have been looking to-day, it is doing 
a great work by enlarging the basis of those studies 
which are of primary importance for all literature and 
history. This is really to work in the Athenian spirit ; 
and it will bring fresh honour to London — in words 
which a living poet applies to Athens — 

While this city's name on earth shall be for earth her 
mightiest name. 



THE END 



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